# the french library



## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

For all men and women on the ground without time to "train the brain" : This thread could be interesting for you.
You will find some summaries of books with military related topics. found online.
My two cents


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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Patrick O'Donnell. We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2006. xxii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, photographs, chronology, notes, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-306-81469-3.

Reviewed for H-War by Rick Baillergeon, Tactics Department, U.S. > Army Command and General Staff College

Portraying the Human Dimension of War

Over the past months numerous books relating to the war in Iraq have been published. The quality of these books has certainly been mixed. The greatest weakness in most has been the inability of authors to depict truly the human dimension of war. This is a glaring omission because individual and small unit actions characterize the war in Iraq. It is not a war fought with long-range weapons systems and pure technology.

Patrick O'Donnell's new volume, _We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with
the Marines Who Took Fallujah_, superbly captures the human dimension of war that is missing in so many books of this genre. _We Were One_ details the raw emotions, the ultimate highs and dramatic lows, the supreme personal sacrifices, and the bonding and unbreakable friendships resulting from intense combat. It is an extremely powerful and personal volume that will dramatically impact both those who have experienced combat and those who have not.

O'Donnell should be familiar to many. His previous efforts were _Beyond Valor: World War II's Ranger and Airborne Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat_ (2001), which was the winner of the prestigious William E. Colby
award for Outstanding Military History; _Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of World War II's OSS_ (2006); and _Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat_ (2003). Superb writing, exhaustive research, and the ability to quickly gain and maintain a reader's interest characterized these books. Following the same formula, _We Were One_ takes these characteristics to a higher level.

In four parts, O'Donnell tells the story of the marines through the First Platoon, Lima Company, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment. First, he describes the platoon's initial formation while platoon members executed predeployment training in Camp Pendleton, California, in March 2004. Second, he examines the platoon's arrival in Kuwait in June 2004, and their initial months in Iraq. Third, he details the platoon's participation in the fierce Battle for Fallujah in November 2004. He concludes by examining the physical, emotional, and mental effects the battle had on these marines.

The Battle for Fallujah (Operation Al-Fajr, or New Dawn) is the focal point of the book. Coalition forces (led by over ten thousand American troops) began their assault of the city on November 8. Their mission was to regain control of Fallujah by the January 2005 elections in order to assist in making the elections reality. Defending the city (almost completely evacuated by civilians) was a combination of well entrenched and heavily armed two thousand to three thousand insurgents, Jihadists, and terrorists. For the next two weeks, coalition forces (including First Platoon, Lima Company) engaged in brutal urban fighting. Finally, after intense fighting and significant casualties, coalition forces took control of the city.

How does O'Donnell succeed in depicting the human dimension of war?
First, from the book's opening pages, he begins to humanize the marines
of the First Platoon. He describes their personalities, includes short biographies on each marine, and provides brief vignettes on most platoon
members. By the time the First Platoon enters Fallujah, readers will
feel they know these marines personally. This sets the conditions for
O'Donnell to portray the human dimension during the Battle for Fallujah.

The second reason why the author is successful is because he spent the Battle for Fallujah with the First Platoon. O'Donnell volunteered to go
to Iraq (one of the first civilian historians in-country) and observed
combat operations directly. This has obviously enabled him to gain
valuable insight and the "feel for the battle" that authors utilizing
interviews after the fact cannot hope to obtain. In writing books such
as this, there is nothing that can take the place of being there. Certainly, the adage, "you must walk the walk to talk the talk" is relevant here.
Readers will find numerous strengths in _We Were One_. Inserted throughout the book are excellent, detailed, and easy to read maps. These maps greatly assist readers in visualizing the terrain in which the battle took place. The author includes over forty photographs (many taken personally), which vividly depict the operations in Fallujah and further humanize the members of the platoon. These images perfectly complement the author's written words. O'Donnell's writing style is fast paced and descriptive. Consequently, many will find _We Were One_to be one of those rareone-sitting books. Readers will not want to put it down.

The book's biggest strength is O'Donnell's ability to convey the personal aspect of combat. Throughout the book, the author highlights the emotional and mental hurdles that each marine faced. Among the areas the author addresses are how individual marines dealt with their fears of combat, the interaction between veteran marines and those taking part in combat for the first time, the emotions marines felt when they had killed their first person in combat, and how marines individually and collectively handled the deaths of their fellow marines in combat (the First Platoon lost seven marines during the battle). These combine to portray the human dimension of war better than any book I have recently read.

However, those expecting a broader view of the second Battle for Fallujah will not be satisfied with this volume. The author offers just enough of the operational and strategic context of the operation to put the small unit actions in perspective. For those in search of this broader perspective, Bing West's equally outstanding _No True Glory_ (2006) is highly recommended.

In his preface, the author tells the story about a marine (who had just
experienced the death of his close friend) who asked O'Donnell what he
would write about regarding his experience in Iraq. O'Donnell answered,
"That I was with a band of heroes and I am going to tell the truth about
what happened here" (p. ix). O'Donnell has clearly done both in _We Were
One_. Those who seek to gain understanding of the human dimension of war and the type of fighting our marines and soldiers conduct daily must read _We Were One_.



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purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net:Humanities &
Social Sciences Online.


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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala. Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 354 pp. Notes, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4457-9.

Reviewed for H-War by Bianka J. Adams, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia

The U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Just in the last two years, the list of books on the U.S. led invasion and occupation of Iraq has grown by leaps and bounds.[1] They include George Packer's _The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq_ (2005), Michael R. Gordon's and Bernard E. Trainor's _Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq_ (2006), Rajiv Chanderasekaran's _Imperial Life in the Emerald Green City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone_ (2006), Thomas E. Ricks's _Fiasco: The American > Military Adventure in Iraq_ (2006), L. Paul Bremer's and Malcom > McConnell's _My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope_ (2006), and Bob Woodward's _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part 3_ (2006), to name but the most popular.

With the American occupation of Iraq in its fifth year, two British lecturers in politics, from the universities of Bristol and Cambridge respectively, have contributed their interpretation of events in Iraq. Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala's _Iraq in Fragments_ is an attempt to "describe and explain the U.S. state-building project and its legacy in the context of local, regional and global politics" (p.1). They based their analysis on extensive study of secondary sources such as published U.S. government papers and reports; British, American, and Arabic newspaper articles; think tank papers and databases; and interviews with a few "anonymous" primary sources who previously worked for Ambassador Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

Herring and Rangwala divided the book into five chapters followed by a conclusion. A lengthy introductory chapter acquaints the > reader with their basic concepts of analysis. The second chapter, entitled "The State," deals with the "fragmentation of political authority." In it, the authors argue that the CPA failed in its attempt to build a strong central government for Iraq because it was not prepared to relinquish control of state affairs to an indigenous government (p. 83). The unintended consequence of the CPA holding on too tightly was a fragmentation of power among different groups at the center and along the periphery.

In the next chapter on "Governance" the authors expand upon their fragmentation of power theory. They contend that the structure of the CPA exacerbated the centrifugal trend in Iraqi politics. The authority's regional offices acted independently of the central office in Baghdad and formed alliances with local tribes. As evidence the authors cite retroactive recognitions that the CPA granted for the appointments (by tribal leaders) of governors and police chiefs in Al-Anbar, Karbala, and Basra (p. 113). In the absence of a strong political center, Herring and Rangwala assert that patrimonial, neo-patrimonial, sectarian, and party relationship bonds further accelerated the devolution of political power not only to regions and tribes, but also to religious leaders and political parties.

In chapter 4, the authors tackle the thorny topic of insurgency and counterinsurgency. According to their analysis, the insurgency is made up of a mixture of Baathist, terrorist, and sectarian groups that share a common goal of wrecking U.S. attempts at state building (p. 170). Responding to the insurgents' challenge, the Coalition forces had a choice between coercion and what Herring and Rangwala termed "legitimation." The Coalition chose coercion and alienated the Iraqi civilian population in the process. While the authors acknowledge that U.S. Army doctrine writers learned from mistakes and incorporated the lessons in a new counterinsurgency manual, they state that the Army still defaults to employing coercion in response to attacks (p. 178). In asserting that opinion, the authors have effectively dismissed any notion that the Iraqi Interim Government can exert meaningful influence over coalition military operations.

The volume's fifth chapter deals with the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. Here, as in the chapter on state building, the authors opine that the United States was unwilling to cede control to the Iraqis. Hence, large U.S. corporations received the majority of lucrative rebuilding contracts and American dominated reconstruction institutions ensured that that practice continued (pp. 218-222). Unfortunately, the Iraqi business communities' ability to realistically participate (considering that nation's culture of graft and corruption, the physical damage caused by the war, and a decade of economic sanctions) is not adequately examined. The authors point out, however, that U.S. policies designed to open up the Iraqi economy and integrate it into the global market at least partially succeeded (p. 234). Iraq's integration into "informal" global trading of weapons, oil, pornography, and illegal drugs, on the other hand, was quite complete (p. 216).

In the concluding chapter, Herring and Rangwala offer their analysis of the legacy of the occupation. They assess it by measuring the occupation's impact on the Iraqi state's functional scope, institutional capacity, domestic and international autonomy, identity, and coherence. The authors make a case that, while Coalition revived enough of the state's functions to keep it from failing, the occupation's principal legacy in Iraq is the fragmentation of political authority.

Herring and Rangwala's _Iraq in Fragments_ differs substantially from the previously mentioned publications about Iraq because it is strictly an analysis of the U.S. led occupation. As such, the book is best suited for readers who are already familiar with the events > in Iraq and who are interested in how political scientists categorize and assess them. The authors attempt to do both with varying degrees of success. The analytical concepts they introduce for measuring the impact of the occupation on the state and on governance allow readers to thread their way through a bewildering labyrinth of tribal loyalties, familial bonds, political parties, foreign influences, and patrimonial relationships. By comparison, the chapters on the insurgency and the economy are ineffective and at times confusing. On the whole, I found the book thought provoking and worth reading.

Note

[1]. The views expressed in this review are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official positions or the views of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency or the Department of Defense.


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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Robert M. Citino. Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. x + 424 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1300-5.

Reviewed for H-War by William Shane Story, U.S. Army Center of Military History



Multiple Awards, Great Reviews, and Fundamental Flaws

The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 stunned military historians. At a crucial moment, in the weeks and months after Saddam’s fall when the invasion was becoming the occupation, accomplished historians suspended critical analysis of the situation to publish glowing accounts of the campaign.[1] Culminating their stories on April 9, 2003 (the high water mark for the invasion when Saddam fled the American onslaught), these authors discounted the occupation’s mounting challenges to recount a historic triumph. In Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare, Robert M. Citino joins those who toasted success in lieu of weighing what it meant to invade a desert and occupy an Arab country riven by sectarian strife. Citino has long emphasized the importance of context, the difficulty of applying a model of previous successes to new situations, and the often-frustrating legacies of so-called victories. In most of Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm, Citino continues to develop those same themes in analyzing far-flung conflicts and synthesizing theory and doctrine. His sixty pages of notes attest to quality work, and make valuable reading in their own right. In the final two chapters, however, the book points to isolated combats as proof of scientific progress in the profession of American arms. Citino closes his work with an error-filled description of the march to Baghdad that validates General Tommy Franks’s declaration of a “fast and final” campaign.

The first five chapters are Clausewitzian surveys of miscalculation and chance in which military success is so occasional that it demands the greatest of care and imposes humility on any who would take it for granted. Chapter 1 abridges Citino’s earlier examinations of interwar German Army doctrine and training, and modern armies’ disappointing attempts to fight industrialized wars efficiently, studies that launched his well-deserved reputation for brilliant analysis. [2] For decades, decisive victory was a chimera; but Heinz Guderian and other German generals solved the quandaries posed by new technologies to reap triumphs between 1939 and 1941. In chapter 2, the Wehrmacht’s success united Hitler’s enemies and led to larger difficulties that sapped German strength and initiative with catastrophic results. Citino turns to Allied tactics in chapter 3, considering how British, Russian, and American commanders tried to replicate the Wehrmacht’s campaigns. Repeatedly, national circumstances shaped each country’s military efforts more than the notion of blitzkrieg, and the price of victory was a war of attrition.

After 1945, the Wehrmacht’s early performance remained the grail of professional excellence, and would-be Guderians have ever since imagined themselves leading unstoppable armored columns to martial glory. In practice, even victories have often been Pyrrhic due to war’s exorbitant costs. In chapter 4, Citino turns to Korea—a stalemate—as an under-appreciated example of how armies fight, what war is, and what it yields. The 1953 ceasefire’s ambiguous non-victory left the belligerents uncertain what lessons to draw from the bloodshed. On the other hand, Korea’s dramatic reversals; complex operations; infantry tactics; fast movements; alternatively strained and abundant logistics; hard fighting and slow diplomacy offer considerable material for studying modern war. Moreover, Korea’s unresolved division underscores the limits of what operational warfare can achieve.

As in Korea, military success in the Arab-Israeli wars was less than definitive, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was a futile curse. In 1971, however, India’s campaign against Pakistan was decisive and quick. Contemporary observers extolled India’s “blitzkrieg” tactics, but Citino argues persuasively that policy, strategy, timing, planning, and execution cumulatively made a decisive victory not only possible, but likely. Without taking anything away from the Indian accomplishment, the result turned on India’s numerous advantages overwhelming Pakistan’s numerous disadvantages. Perhaps most important, Pakistan preferred India’s limited object—East Pakistani independence—to continued fighting. In Citino’s view, India’s 1971 success deserves study, but singular circumstances make the operation a case study, not a model.

Given the prudence that permeates Citino’s writings, his philosophical transformation in the last two chapters is an enigma. It begins with an inexplicable passage in which Citino sets up a straw man and calls it Russell Weigley, attributing ideas to the eminent historian that Weigley explicitly rejected. According to Citino, Weigley’s mistakes were common ones. For example, Weigley reduced American strategy to “gathering overwhelming force,” destroying enemy armies, and forcing the enemy’s unconditional surrender (p. 226). Further, Citino says, Weigley misinterpreted Ulysses S. Grant as an unsubtle butcher (p. 227). Citino lays himself the task of correcting these and others of Weigley’s mistakes. The problem with Citino’s assertions is that Weigley argued, in his seminal American Way of War, (that multiple tensions have roiled Americans’ efforts to define coherent strategies. As the nation grew and its enemies and the worldchanged, many American strategists desired and sought the enemy’s unconditional surrender as the sine qua non of victory. In practice, warfare’s tremendous costs and risks served to limit its use and its power of decision. In discussing Grant, Weigley argued that the general’s reputation as a butcher was misconceived, and he praised Grant’s operational brilliance, his ability to “master the flow of a long series of events,” and the 1863 Vicksburg campaign as a masterpiece of maneuver that spared lives. [3] Weigley’s analysis and Citino’s comments on it are irreconcilable.

The missteps continue as Citino considers Vietnam, Desert Storm, American strategy in the 1990s, and the march on Baghdad. He begins by dismissing context and complications, and instead plotting a handful of events as points on a grand trajectory of upward progress. He turns Vietnam into an operational success by focusing on the American response to the Tet offensive, which entailed ten weeks of combat in 1968. Desert Storm validated the Army’s operational development, but positive trends came under threat in the 1990s when Army doctrine writers introduced Operations Other Than War and the Army became bogged down in Balkan peacekeeping missions. It was a time when policy-makers and generals were muddling through responses to new world disorders, but Citino berates their efforts while ignoring their problems. Citino continues to evoke Clausewitz, but he embraces certainty, lamenting the Army’s “post-1991 wrong turn” of promoting stability operations at the expense of heavy forces. Regarding humanitarian crises and the anarchy they spawn, Citino asserts “there are plenty of other organizations that do that sort of work, and probably do it better than the army” (p. 294).

Citino closes with a victorious rendering of the Third Infantry Division’s march on Baghdad in 2003 as the most recent proof of what operational warfare and armored forces can accomplish. Using superlatives and hyperbole for effect, he offers the qualification that the victory’s meaning is not yet clear. Some things, however, were clear immediately after Saddam fell: American supply lines were tenuous, American forces were exhausted, and American strategy lacked direction. In Quest for Decisive Victory, Citino cited such problems as the reasons armies frequently fail to pursue routed enemies to their final destruction. An observer schooled in Citino’s canon would have seen Saddam’s fall as a moment of dangerous opportunity, but Citino welcomed progress triumphant.

Despite these criticisms, Blitzkrieg is a valuable survey of wars and military theory, and I recommend it to historians and officers seeking a concise recounting of diverse conflicts. Citino offers insight, useful comparisons, and points of departure for vigorous debates on the structuring and use of military force, and a case study on how examining the past may not illuminate the present.



Notes

[1]. See, John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); and Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003).

[2]. Robert M. Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-1939 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999); and Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899-1940 (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002).

[3] Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 139.
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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Alex Vernon. Most Succinctly Bred. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006. xii + 100 pp. Index. (cloth), ISBN 0-87338-855-0.

Reviewed for H-War by Bradford Wineman, Department of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College



The Academic’s Gulf War Syndrome

This book, with its title drawn from an E.E. Cummings poem, presents a collection of essays written over the course of ten years (although published previously in other works). The essays are arranged roughly in the chronological order of the events on which the author muses. Vernon’s style and structure borrows heavily from his literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien (occasionally to the point of distraction for students of these works), using simplistic yet poignant wording in introspective stories that reveal the inner-musings of the author and capture complex human emotion through the otherwise unsophisticated method of storytelling. As a student of literature, Vernon also draws from other great works, ranging from the classics to his contemporaries, to draw perspective and context.

The selections take the reader through the author’s ordinary yet unique life, from growing up in late 1980s Cold War, middle America; to attending West Point, deploying and returning from the first Gulf War; to observing the coming second Gulf War as an academic. His journey is an unusual one, in which he wades in the ethical ambiguity of his cadetship, embracing many of the Academy’s values but morally rebelling against much of its conformity by experimenting with Wicca and witchcraft to create an emotional location within himself that the Army could never intrude upon.

However, Vernon’s contractual commitment to the Army eventually takes him to the sands of Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield, where he reflects on the uncertainties of the impending “Mother of All Battles,” much in the same manner as fellow Gulf War veteran turned pensive author Anthony Swofford. Upon his return from the war, Vernon took advantage of the major Department of Defense draw-down and left the military for graduate school and a career as a professor of literature. He also reflects on the contradictions of being a soldier in the freethinking, anti-military “ivory tower” of a liberal arts college. Drawing from his own war experience and the inspiration of fellow literati, Vernon’s final essays explore his feelings on September 11, and his fears regarding the impending war with Iraq, overlapping with the fears of his new fatherhood.

After he addressed an audience of Army ROTC cadets about his combat experiences, many of the students thanked Vernon profusely for adding a human dimension to the military experience that their ultra-technological and doctrinal training had lacked. It is this theme—the dichotomy between the human and the machinistic, the feeling versus the unfeeling—that drives his narrative. Whether writing of his experience as a literature major in West Point’s engineering curriculum, as the hardened combat veteran in a stereotypically non-conformist liberal arts department, or of the absence of visible human suffering in the surgical air strikes of the Gulf War, Vernon’s essays reveal a constant struggle between these two paradigms.

This dichotomy occasionally presents problems for the author. Vernon depicts himself as the misplaced academic or poet lost in the maelstrom of the military’s warrior culture (à la Hemingway, O’Brien and to a lesser extent, Swofford). He questions his choice of career while a West Point cadet, weeps openly before a chaplain before the war fearing the death of his soldiers, and declares himself a “a soldier, not a warrior” and professes to “abhor violence” (pp. 50, 70). He is, self-admittedly, the reluctant soldier. But in his chapter “The Gulf War and Post-Modern Memory,” he lambastes post-modern theorists and pundits who disavow the overall significance of the Gulf War because of its unexpected short duration and nearly bloodless result. Vernon vehemently contends that the conflict was not a video game or a television drama, but a real shooting-killing nightmare for him and his fellow soldiers who put their lives on the line against one of the world’s most dangerous armies. Now, he demands the respect and attention for service as a warrior in an otherwise forgotten war. He curses war but bristles with insult when the war he himself condemned is not remembered correctly or mocked for its irrelevance.

Within the American warrior culture, the veterans of Operation Desert Storm find themselves lost in a sea of heroic obscurity crammed awkwardly amongst the Greatest Generation of World War II, the bloodied Vietnam generation, and the new heroes of the Iraq War and Global War on Terrorism. Regardless, Vernon essentially asserts, Americans need to acknowledge the forgotten human element of the conflict instead of being blinded by the success of the cold arithmetic of technology’s overplayed role. Unfortunately, technology did ultimately win the Gulf War and made it the bloodless, Hollywood-like victory portrayed on CNN. This war was not waged by the triumph of human spirit or the courage of the individual soldier like the other conflicts of the last half-century. In the end, this plastic perception of the war does undermine the small number of servicemen who lost their lives and the scores of others who returned home with various physical and mental conditions. Nevertheless, Vernon’s quest for Homeric catharsis at times lacks historical perspective.

Despite this one quibble, the author’s use of paradox to frame events around him as well as his own character make these essays remarkably engaging. Vernon’s musings bounce between the world of the real and the tangible (the Academy, his tank platoon, graduate school), and the intellectual and hyper-imaginative reveries attempting to find perspective in the chaotic world around him. Vernon splashes each essay with narratives of his experiences, soul-searching monologues, literature excerpts, socio-political commentary, and anecdotal stories all woven together into thematically tight packages placing his personal story in the broader context of history and the human condition. Most Succinctly Bred provides a worthwhile and meditative read for those within and outside of the military.


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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

David J. Danelo. Blood Stripes: The Grunts View of the War in Iraq. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2006. xiv + 345 pp. Photographs, glossary, index. (paper), ISBN 0-8117-0164-6.

Reviewed for H-War by Paul Westermeyer, History Division, Marine > Corps University.

The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies will be fiercely debated by historians for decades to come. The conflict has created or exposed deep political divisions within American society and across the globe. There is, and will likely remain, deep disagreement between scholars over many of the most basic facts about the causes and conduct of this war. It is likely that shelves will groan for decades to come under the weight of books attempting to explain every aspect of this conflict. David Danelo's Blood Stripes_ is just such a book.

In 2004, many of the Marine Corps' units which had participated in the invasion of 2003 returned to Iraq as part of the pacification campaign.
They found that the enemy they now faced was more determined, better hidden, and somewhat more effective than the Iraqi army they had defeated in 2003. Urban counter-insurrection is one of the most difficult missions a military unit can undertake; the environment surrounds the soldier or Marine with vulnerable non-combatants and impenetrable terrain, since every building is potentially a fortress. In this sort of warfare the juniornon-commissioned officer's judgment and discretion have a profound impact on the course of the war.

Blood Stripes: The Grunt's View of the War in Iraq_ attempts to tell the story of these junior non-commissioned officers (NCOs), primarily sergeants and corporals, whose daily decisions are helping to determine the outcome of the conflict. It follows the stories of a small handful of Marines during the critical occupation period of February-September 2004. The book includes a forward by Steven Pressfield, author of the historical novel _Gates of Fire_ (1999). David Danelo is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with seven years of service as a Marine infantry officer. He served in Iraq during the same period this book covers, though he does not note any personal observations from his service and does not include interviews from any of the junior NCOs who served under his own command.

Danelo follows the standard canon format for such books, describing his
subjects' lives prior to their arrival in Iraq in 2003, their participation in operations in and near Fallujah in the summer of 2004, and their subsequent return to the United States that fall. Obligatory scenes with loved ones and dependents are sprinkled throughout the book. Danelo carefully skirts the politics, in large part because his subjects appear reluctant to express opinions on the topic.

Danelo is at his best when describing specific events; he has a talent for bringing the sand and smells of Mesopotamia alive to his readers. His primary stories revolve not around the action, however, but around the various leadership problems the young NCOs faced and then overcame.
With the exception of Corporal "Shady" Stevens, his primary subjects are infantry NCOs involved in leading combat patrols. The sections dealing with Stevens's headquarters' adventures feel detached and unconnected to the rest of the narrative.

The book is written in a clear, journalistic prose, with an omniscient authorial voice, rather than the more dispassionate historical style. Unfortunately, the book lacks footnotes or endnotes, and Danelo paraphrases his interviewees rather than quoting them. This makes it essentially impossible to tell when one is reading the words and thoughts of an interviewee, and when we are reading Danelo's editorial comments. His work is far less useful to scholars than it might have been, as it has very little value as a reliable historical document.

Danelo's obsession with the "Spartan Way" and Pressfield's _Gates of Fire_ further exacerbates this problem. Danelo is clearly a great admirer of Pressfield's work, and of the Spartans as Pressfield > presents them, but it seems unlikely that all of the Marines Danelo interviews are equally as enamored with Pressfield's work. The book is on the reading list of the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program for Corporals and Sergeants, but it is only one of ten books on that list. Even if the young NCOs have all read the book, it seems doubtful they would use the phrase the "Spartan way" or subscribe to Pressfield's theories of Spartan society.

What seems more likely is that Danelo has internalized this concept as an ideal, and sees his ideal illustrated in these Marines. As a unifying structure for his book the "Spartan Way" works. Yet, because Danelo does not allow his subjects to speak for themselves, its relevance remains suspect. _Blood Stripes_ is fairly typical of its genre, providing a window into the world of the junior enlisted infantry Marine. It is an extremely readable and well-organized book for the general public, but its lack of citations and clearly delineated quotations make it of questionable usefulness for the academic reader.


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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Sasha Lezhnev. Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. Foreword by John Prendergast. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2005. xv + 119 pp. Chronology of events, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0957-1; (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-1765-1.

Reviewed for H-War by Iavor Rangelov, Department of Government, > London School of Economics and Political Science

Warlords, Practitioners, and Scholars

Books written for practitioners must offer straightforward solutions to problems that scholars often identify as intractable. Sasha Lezhnev's project--to articulate guidelines for countering warlords in failing state--is more ambitious. The book takes a comparative approach to the subject, drawing on two case studies: Sierra Leone and Tajikistan. Furthermore, the author's template for analysis implicitly incorporates some key lessons distilled from the academic literature. Nevertheless, this study will resonate better in policy circles rather than in academic ones, since at times the narrative moves too quickly from evidence to prescription and leaves important issues and arguments under-theorized.

The narrative unfolds by offering a definition of warlordism in a globalized framework, then zooms out to consider the success of various efforts pursued in the context of the two cases, and closes with recommendations for designing strategies to deal with warlords. The author breaks down the definition of warlords by looking at their motivations and social make-up; the weak state environment that allows them to flourish; the methods that warlords employ (converging on assaults on civilians); and the organizational structures that enable effective mobilization and > control. Sierra Leone and Tajikistan are then analyzed to illustrate the definition, emphasizing the degrees of warlordism (the former being closer to the ideal type than the latter), and are used to sift through evidence of what works and what fails in eliminating warlords. Important differences, for example pertaining to identity politics and the nature of the collapsing state regime, are briefly mentioned but not integrated in an overall framework.

The book emphasizes that sustainable peace requires efforts to dislodge warlords and to transform the broader political and security environment, arguing for alternatives to the standard approach that incorporates warlords in power-sharing structures in exchange for peace. Lezhnev's solution is a mix of short-term strategies of coercion to deal with intransigent warlords, and longer-term strategies of state-building to transform political incentives. Coercive options include imposing "smart" sanctions that are resource-sensitive and have a global reach; deploying internal, international or "transnational" (mixed) force; prosecuting warlords under international criminal law; and establishing programs for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. State-building policies involve undermining the power of warlords by supporting alternative sources of authority; promoting democratization; fostering economics reconstruction and employment; and, as a last resort, conducting structured peace negotiations that may provide for warlord reintegration.

The study is driven by a problem-solving imperative and moves swiftly from empirical analysis to policy recommendations. This sleek structure, however, comes at a price. Most of the key arguments are constructed at the interface of the Sierra Leone and Tajikistan cases, but in order to generalize them coherently the author needs a broader framework that is often missing. The field > of ethnic conflict studies has moved to conceptualize the role of identity in recent conflicts and the dynamics of peace-building in such settings. Research on ollapsing state structures, violence against civilians, and the globalized war economy has made rapid advances in the last years and is well integrated in the "new wars" literature. Similarly, the mushrooming literature on human security has developed the principles of multilateralism, regional focus, and rebuilding legitimate political authority in responses to warlord-driven conflict. Lack of deeper engagement with these bodies of scholarship will be puzzling for some academic readers. To be sure, however, the strategies to deal with warlords offered by Lezhnev are persuasive and relevant, even if they often reflect the underlying problem without capturing it explicitly. Since the book is addressed primarily to practitioners and olicymakers, its target audience will be rewarded for picking it up.
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## archade (Feb 10, 2008)

Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela R. Aall, eds. Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007. xviii + 726 pp. Tables, notes, index. (cloth), ISBN 1-929223-97-8; (paper), ISBN 1-929223-96-X.

Reviewed for H-War by Ralph Hitchens, Independent Scholar Farewell, Westphalia!

This massive collection of thirty-seven essays offers wide-ranging analysis of the "end of history" era in which we find ourselves, although if the authors are united on one idea, it is that Francis Fukuyama got it wrong (_End of History and the Last Man_ [1992]). Be that as it may, we are surely at the end of a major historical epoch in which conflict between nation-states was the default frame of reference for politicians and historians. Mohammed Ayoob's essay "State Making, State Breaking, and State Failure" echoes what I first heard from a senior CIA analyst more than one decade ago, that the "Westphalian model" was passing from the scene. Ayoob maintains that we cannot accept the transcendence of this hallowed geopolitical construct, but rather must work to strengthen it. In analytical terms, this involves reaching back to identify common ground between European states in their formative era and today's failing states in the third world, a difficult prospect for historians and near-impossible for policymakers. Still, Ayoob does make the case that the root problem is widespread inadequacy of state authority in the developing world, not (as it so often seems) the excessive use of state power against one's own citizens.
For a narrative and statistical overview of conflict in the present, the reader should jump to chapter 29, Andrew Mack's "Successes and Challenges in Conflict Management." Mack shows that despite the ubiquitous chaos and violence that besets mankind at the start of the twenty-first century, things actually seem to be getting better in many respects. An essay with particular appeal for historians is "Turbulent Transitions" by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. The authors might be criticized for using too many examples from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European history applied to less-mature polities in the twenty-first-century third world, but they draw their examples with insightful economy. Their argument is at once coherent and somewhat frustrating for American policymakers. Mansfield and Snyder contend that "states are especially war prone when they start making a transition toward democracy before the requisite institutions are in place" (p.
172). South Africa, they note, has done reasonably well evolving into a
mass democracy; other African states, like Burundi, have not done so
well. The authors convincingly refute the neo-Wilsonian thrust of the Bush administration, where all the rhetoric is about democracy and elections with less said about an independent judiciary or a free press. They are not the first to note that within most Islamic states in particular, "the institutional preparations for democracy are > weak" (p.173).

Economist Paul Collier has some interesting thoughts on the economic
imperatives of revolutionary groups, seeing such entities "not as the
ultimate protest groups but as the ultimate manifestation of organized crime" (p. 198). Of course rebel groups, unlike ordinary criminal organizations, must "develop a discourse of grievance," but what ultimately matters is whether the group can sustain itself financially (p. 199). He concludes that "rebellion is unrelated to objective circumstances or grievance while being caused by the feasibility of predation" (p. 199). Logically, then, states should respond to an insurgency by reducing opportunities for predation rather than addressing grievances. Post-conflict settlement is also a stark economic issue. In Mozambique, for example, Renamo was able to become a nonviolent political party in large part because foreign aid donors were able to offset its income from extortion and theft; and in Angola, UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) acquired so much wealth from diamonds that foreign aid donors had no impact and the conflict could not be easily terminated. In contrast to Collier, Frances Stewart and Graham Brown look in more traditional fashion at broader socioeconomic issues, calling for efforts to correct "horizontal inequalities" in both economic and political spheres as the best formula to resolve or prevent conflict in weak states (p. 222). Might these two approaches not work in parallel?

Lawrence Freedman examines the relevance of humanitarian intervention into the war on terror. The failure of the current administration to appreciate this linkage has, he argues, complicated U.S. efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "Peace support," he notes, is historically problematic for the U.S. military and our experience in the 1990s was not encouraging (p. 248). In particular, growing casualty-intolerance and our obsession with an "exit strategy" in every intervention cannot help but prolong insurgencies. Alas, the long U.S. learning process in dealing with instability and insurgencies in the current era has been cut short by the war on terror. Among the many lessons we have yet to internalize is the "battle of the narrative" preeminent in this age of ubiquitous media presence and, God help us, the Internet (p. 259). The good news Freedman offers echoes what Mack and other contributors point out--declining conflict statistics worldwide. Only international terrorism, it seems, is on the rise.

Brian Urquhart, a longtime senior U.N. official and surely one of the most experienced "blue helmet" soldiers around, has some counterintuitive advice on the use of force in humanitarian interventions. He shows that when it comes to stabilizing a chaotic situation, rapid deployment is more important than staff preparation or troop training. Bruce Jentleson tackles the question of "never again"--the legacy of humanitarian disasters like Ruanda, where intervention was either aborted or came too late. Military force, he argues, must be "something more than a last resort" (p. 292). Robert J. Art and Patrick Cronin examine the difficult issue of coercive diplomacy, reaching the unsurprising conclusion that in face-off situations the stakes are high for the target as well as the coercer, and it is not easy to find the correct balance between threat and inducement. (Munich, it seems, may still be relevant.) It is a relief to get down to brass tacks with Michael O'Hanlon, who recommends that the international community build a peacekeeping and stabilization force on the order of six hundred thousand troops, enabling sequential and even simultaneous intervention deployments of up to two hundred thousand troops to be fielded.

There is much else of interest here: Joseph Nye reminding us (as we urgently need to be reminded) about "soft power" (pp. 390-391); Marina Ottaway on the unsurprising failure of "coercive democratization" (p. 603); and Kimberly Martin on the intriguing similarities between today's humanitarian interventions and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism--not the brutal variant practiced by King Leopold or the kaiser, but American and British liberal democratic imperialism based on the Kiplingesque "white man's burden" (p. 625). (Today's implementation, it seems, lacks the resources or political will to succeed.) Space precludes a full inventory of this collection, but certainly the book contains a wealth of thoughtful analysis for the contemporary historian and policy wonk alike. I wonder, though, why the United States Institute of Peace opted for a huge, expensive volume that will scarcely be seen outside the halls of academia. Why not instead beef up their website with even more high-profile content? Why not become a favored bookmark of the policy elite (assuming members of said elite use their computers for anything apart from e-mail)? If we are taking a fresh look at the "Westphalian model," why not reexamine other legacy structures? Is a book reviewer raising this question "shooting the messenger" after a fashion?


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## archade (Feb 11, 2008)

*Richard E. Rupp. NATO after 9/11: An Alliance in Continuing Decline*. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. xiv + 282 pp. Tables, charts, notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-7188-3.

Reviewed for H-War by Jonathan Reed Winkler, Department of History, Wright State University

The Long Slow Sunset
Strategic alliances are among the most complex of historical subjects. The tradeoffs, compromises, pressures, and rewards inherent in these bargains have fascinated scholars since Thucydides first chronicled the collapse of the Delian League into the Athenian Empire.
Now Richard Rupp, a political scientist at Purdue University-Calumet, offers his views on the incipient collapse of that most powerful of recent alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. In NATO after 9/11 , Rupp argues that "NATO's days as a coherent, effectively functioning military alliance are waning" (p. 2). He suggests that the lack of a common menace to members' vital interests, compounded by growing differences between the United States and the rest of the alliance, means NATO will become ever less valuable to its members (p. 3). While acknowledging the repeated claims since the end of the Cold War that NATO was in decline, Rupp suggests that the successive efforts to revitalize NATO have not worked, and that the problems related to Afghanistan and Iraq make this manifest. In his view, NATO is no longer an effective alliance or a credible military threat. While both the United States and Europe share the blame for this decline, no amount of reform will fix NATO. Instead, a new security regime must emerge.

Rupp develops this argument through a chronological analysis of the alliance, focusing primarily on the period after the Cold War when NATO members searched for a new shared mission. In his first chapter, he lays out the theoretical framework for the study, and seeks to identify the national interests of the participating nations, in order to clarify the differences that the United States and other members have over contemporary threat perception. The current threats that NATO members identify, ranging from economic or environmental problems to terrorism and weapons proliferation, are nowhere nearly as galvanizing as the Soviet threat was during the Cold War. The alliance that came into being during the Cold War was about collective defense, oriented against a common foe, and not about collective security, oriented towards a region and varying, evolving threats. The collapse of the Eastern threat, then, posed significant existential questions for the alliance. But rather than go out of business, the alliance changed its focus and even expanded.

The 1990s are the subject of chapter 2, in which he examines the formative transformation of the alliance from one of collective defense to collective security. This is the most interesting and important part of the book. Supporters of NATO saw the deployment of forces to the Balkans as proof that the alliance had found a new, successful reason for being. But, Rupp argues that the more significant story was that this period saw the beginning of divergence over policy, threat perception, and military capabilities among the alliance members, differences that would only continue to grow. The United States and European members began to see differently on a number of issues which, though unrelated to NATO, complicated efforts to reform NATO. Changing threat perceptions, driven by the different regional and global outlooks of the partners, as well as varying domestic priorities, compounded this. Also important was the fact that the United States' continuing maintenance of a military second to none created a "free rider" problem, allowed the European NATO members to eschew military spending for social spending, and compound the growing military capabilities gap between the United States and the other members. If NATO does cease to exist, Rupp has made a good case that the 1990s, and not the post-9/11 period, are where historians should look for the real causes of the alliance's decline.

The subsequent three chapters cover NATO since the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Here, Rupp makes his major point that 9/11 failed to galvanize the alliance or repair the weakening that had occurred in the 1990s. Immediately after the attacks, NATO members invoked Article V, but Rupp is careful to note that there was not unanimous support for this, and he explores the problems that the nature of this conflict posed to the alliance. NATO had been about large, mechanized armed forces and threats from nation-states. But al Qaeda represented something else, and the location, duration, and style of this conflict was not entirely clear. What Rupp then reminds us is that the Bush administration specifically chose not to use the alliance's military forces in general but those of members in particular (the "coalition of the willing" model), in large part because of the capabilities gap revealed during the 1990s. This, together with the subsequent disagreements over the United States' attention to Iraq in 2002-2003, led to real divisions within the alliance's members that culminated in outright efforts by France and Germany to stop the United States in the Security Council in 2003. Rather than rest only on Iraq, however, Rupp is careful to explain that NATO's growing role in Afghanistan has been of critical importance to the alliance. If NATO can pull off a successful out-of-area operation, it might well prove to its members as well as others in the Eurasian landmass that it is a viable military alliance that can project power effectively for publicly acceptable missions. What Rupp notes, however, is that by 2006 (when the book went to press) the operations were less aggressive than NATO, the United States or the Afghanis wanted. Inadequate numbers of soldiers, limited equipment, and a hesitancy to engage in potentially difficult combat has weakened NATO's mission there. This may yet change, and so Rupp is careful to end his book not speculating on Afghanistan so much as ruminating on the likely further decline in NATO's relevance. Rupp's work is clear, concise, fair, and certainly timely. But it is not without methodological and interpretive issues that raised questions for this reviewer, who is, it should be noted, a historian and not a political scientist. Some problems stem from the need to compress a large amount of material into a short analysis. For example, Rupp does not mention the French withdrawal from NATO military planning in 1966, even though this would suggest a major precedent for how the alliance might come apart. When discussing the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Rupp does not mention the Turkish rejection of the pass-through of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, which occurred despite NATO's significant guarantee of Turkish security days earlier. One would have thought that this would have been a much more visible example of the alliance's problems in 2003 (it actually affected the invasion) than the refusal of the European allies to allow overflights or equipment transfers in support of the war.

A broader concern, however, was that the work was largely Amero-centric in its analysis and based on English-language sources. Rupp discusses the Europeans in a unitary fashion, in a manner suggesting that the different countries held largely the same view on all things. A notable exception to this is his discussion of the pre-Iraq wrangling by "old" and "new" Europe, but this exception illustrates the rule. While examining each member might have posed monumental analytical problems, even a modest effort was warranted in light of the political shifts across the continent over the last two years. Moreover, poor Canada is shunted aside. Neither American nor European, its views on policy matters in this period (Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, Iraq) often were similar to those of many European governments, but Rupp casts the issue more as a division between the United States and Europe. The book's sourcing was also problematic, but in a way that does not reflect negatively on the author so much as on all such works of contemporary history. Rupp relied upon secondary literature, mostly newspaper and wire press accounts in English, journals (academic and policy), interviews with U.S. and European officials (mostly unattributed), and a few primary source documents. Because significant primary source material will not be available to scholars for some time to come, any work such as the one under review here must necessarily rest upon a broad base of secondary material. But we need to be more cautious about how we use newspaper accounts, particularly on hotly contested geopolitical debates. Indeed, the relative absence of continental European news sources, in an electronic age where much is available online, in this work on the major alliance in Europe struck this reviewer as surprising.
NATO after 9/11_ also raises questions that should be of great importance for historians and political scientists as we begin to analyze the "Long War" and make sense of its significance. Rupp's argument is that the prosecution of this war has compounded significant preexisting faults with the result that NATO as a military alliance has been severely weakened. But this inherently requires that we view what has occurred since 9/11 as a conventional military event, one that NATO members had, prior to 9/11 envisioned as the purpose of the alliance. With that kind of an approach, the events after 9/11 in Afghanistan and then Iraq appear to be an inadequate use of NATO's military power and the strengths of the alliance. By this approach, and there is much merit to it, the United States is a unilateral actor and the alliance the victim of diverging viewpoints of its members. We should not let this approach narrow our understanding of what this alliance is or can do.
As scholars of military affairs, we must be careful not to assume that conventional military operations (however adapted to new civil affairs or counterinsurgency roles) are the only thing going on during this event. Indeed,in retrospect it may actually be a lesser (though nonetheless important)part of what is going on. However much the alliance appears to have weakened from this, we must ask whether the military institution of NATO, organized towards state-supported large mechanized armed forces, is relevant to this kind of war. The most important parts of the war are hidden behind very high levels of secrecy (just as ULTRA--intelligence gained from decryption of German communications was during World War Two) and include very complex financial, informational and clandestine Special Operations aspects that will not become public for some time. There may in fact be levels of cooperation within NATO that, while not organized around conventional combat arms, are nonetheless important. This may, in fact, mean that NATO will continue to transform but into something other than what it has been in the years since its founding. What Rupp's work reminds us, then, is that we must pay attention to other levels of analysis besides simply the largest, systemic ones, such as personnel, doctrine, force structure, and policy. To take one example, so long as the U.S. military considers an officer's tour through NATO command a benefit rather than a detriment to his or her career, NATO will be important to the United States. When NATO is no longer a choice billet but a backwater for retiring officers, then the alliance will be dead.
Throughout history, alliances have been fickle creations, ones that rarely lasted beyond the immediacy of the crises that spawned them. Some collapsed suddenly (such as NATO's opponent, the Warsaw Pact), while others drifted on into irrelevance and eventual death (such as the Rio Pact). Others have simply transformed into new organizations altogether. As individual Greek city-states found it easier to contribute money rather than ships to the Delian League's navy, the alliance transformed and so was born the Athenian Empire. Richard Rupp has shown us that while we should find it remarkable that NATO lasted as long as it has, there is reason to be concerned about its future. Whether it will turn out as he has argued, in the face of a nuclear-armed Iran or a revived Russia, only time will show.


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## archade (Feb 11, 2008)

David R. Woodward. Hell in the Holy Land: World War I in the Middle East. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. xiv + 253 pp. Photographs, maps, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-2383-7.

Reviewed for H-War by Nikolas Gardner, Air War College

Soldiers of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force

Often hailed as "forgotten" or "lost" by hyperbolic publishers, the experiences of ordinary British soldiers are actually quite well represented in the historical literature on the First World War. Thousands of diaries, letters, and memoirs produced by participants in the conflict have appeared in print since 1918. There also exist numerous compilations of soldiers' accounts. Authors such as Lyn Macdonald and Peter Hart have chronicled the major campaigns of the conflict through the eyes of ordinary participants. In 2005, two different authors published books claiming to contain the last reminiscences of Britain's few surviving veterans of the conflict. While these accounts are often insightful and poignant, a large majority are set in France and Belgium. Thus, the world of the common soldier on the Western Front has become a familiar one, but the conditions faced by his counterparts in other theaters remain more obscure. Hell in the Holy Land, David Woodward's recent study of the war in the Middle East, casts new light on the experiences of soldiers that, in relative terms, really have been "forgotten." In the process, the book underlines the global character of the First World War.

Woodward chronicles British operations in Egypt and Palestine from early 1916 until the fall of 1918, focusing primarily on "the personal and individual side of this campaign" (p. xi). He begins by relating the experiences of British soldiers under U-boat attack in the Mediterranean en route to Egypt, as well as their first impressions of the Middle East. Personal letters and diaries offer numerous insights into their attitudes toward an unfamiliar culture as well as the illicit diversions that beckoned, among them alcohol, drugs, belly dancers, and prostitutes. Succumbing to such temptations could have damaging consequences. As Woodward notes, "British soldiers in Egypt in 1916 were contracting venereal disease at a rate four times greater than those in France" (pp. 29-30). Soldiers' correspondence also contains evidence of the many relationships destroyed by long-term deployment to the Middle East.
The book is not simply a collection of anecdotes. Woodward has written previously on the conduct of the British war effort at the strategic level. Drawing on this background, he places the stories of individual soldiers in a broader context by introducing the principal British commanders and explaining their conduct of operations. He notes that the theater "represented a return to Napoleonic warfare in which a great captain of war might impose his genius and personality on the outcome of a battle" (p. 57). Archibald Murray fell short of this ideal. Woodward credits the first commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) with suppressing the Senussi revolt, securing the Sinai, and orchestrating an advance to the borders of Palestine. He is > critical of Murray's leadership at the First Battle of Gaza, however, and accuses him of "Monday morning quarterbacking" in its aftermath. Woodward also offers a balanced assessment of Edmund Allenby, Murray's more celebrated successor. Famously ill-tempered and gruff, Allenby nonetheless brought a new energy to the campaign. Just as importantly, Woodward notes that Allenby "had advantages possessed by no British general in France: a massive superiority in men and material, and an open flank to attack" (p. 100). Allenby used this relative strength to win a series of victories, culminating in the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917. His dynamic leadership became increasingly reckless, however, as he continued to push into Jordan in 1918 despite reductions to his force. Rather than articulating a central argument, Woodward is content to let the soldiers' accounts speak for themselves. Nevertheless, several themes emerge from this study. First, Woodward shows that service in the EEF was not necessarily an easy assignment compared to the Western Front. Soldiers were more likely to survive the war in the Middle East, where battles were smaller and shorter, but mobile warfare and a hostile climate contributed to acute shortages of food and water as well as a high prevalence of disease. Moreover, the possibility of home leave was exceedingly remote. According to Woodward, "when the war ended, the EEF contained a sizeable number of men who had been in Egypt since 1914-1915" (p. 208). Secondly, Woodward emphasizes the extent to which the EEF was a multinational force. In the summer of 1918, only one of its eleven divisions was entirely British, with units from "Armenia, Britain, Burma, Algeria, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Italy, France, Singapore, Hong Kong, the West Indies, and Egypt" (p. 181). Three battalions of Jewish soldiers also served with Allenby.

Finally, the book touches on the racial and religious tensions that permeated the war in the Middle East. The accounts of British soldiers reveal negative stereotypes of the local Arab population as well as harsh treatment of the _fellahin_, the Egyptian laborers on whom the EEF relied. In addition, Woodward notes that Allenby hesitated to characterize the campaign as a "Crusade" out of concern for the morale of the thousands of Muslims under his command. Many of his subordinates, however, had no compunction about emphasizing its religious connotations to the British soldiers, who responded positively. Given the multiethnic composition of the EEF and the religious issues raised by a campaign in the Holy Land, it is unfortunate that the book is based solely on the diaries and correspondence of British soldiers. Records produced by non-European participants in the campaign are certainly less abundant, but they can be unearthed. Censor's reports held in the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collection, for example, provide some inkling of the impressions of Indian sepoys regarding the war in the Middle East. Examining such material would have enabled Woodward to provide a fuller picture of the experiences of ordinary soldiers in the EEF. That said, Hell in the Holy Land provides a welcome look at the experiences of soldiers in the Middle East from 1916-1918. It also sheds light on a campaign that has been dismissed as a sideshow, but had consequences that continue to reverberate today.


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## archade (Feb 11, 2008)

William Thomas Allison. Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in American Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xv + 230 pp. Notes, tables, bibliography, index.(cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1460-8.

Reviewed for H-War by Michael Noone, The Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America

An Introduction to Military Lawyers in Vietnam

The April 1968 issue of the Federal Bar Association's News reported that sixty members attended the Vietnam Chapter's luncheon meeting at the Rex Hotel in Saigon. How those lawyers spent their professional time is William Thomas Allison's theme. He says in his preface, "My primary purpose is to explain the variety of military legal activities in Vietnam, evaluate them, and share the human side of those activities, all in the context of the war itself. The broader purpose is to expose readers to the complicated nature of military law and military justice in a democratic society as well as to show how difficult it is to include military justice and legal affairs in the vanguard of nation-building operations that include spreading U.S. values as a political objective." He achieves his goals in 186 pages of extremely readable text by keeping a tight focus on Vietnam. Nothing is said about contemporaneous legal activities of the Air Force in Thailand and Okinawa, nor of the Navy's activities in the Gulf. Very little is said about the role of each service's supervising legal authorities outside Vietnam, or of the role played by lawyers and policy makers at the Commander-In-Chief, Pacific; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Law enforcement personnel fare slightly better. Lawyers in Vietnam relied on them to make the cases which could be prosecuted, so there is some discussion of the problems faced by military police and investigators. The author's definition of American military justice in Vietnam does not extend to its products, the prisoners at the notorious Long Binh Jail, the site of a murderous race riot in 1968. This is legal history experienced in country by captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels, nearly all of them judge advocates.

That vantage point makes the book particularly useful as supplementary reading for a course on the war in Vietnam. Its chapters on the drug problem, the black market, currency manipulation and corruption, violations of the laws of war, and criminal justice issues illuminate each topic by giving examples. The case of Captain Archie Kuntze, USN ("The American Mayor of Saigon"), who, according to one witness at his court-martial, had over $23 million stashed in an icebox, illustrates the difficulties prosecutors faced in proving corruption cases. Each chapter is replete with similar examples, some of them, like the My Lai cases, well known. Other cases, like the prosecution of PFC Michael McInnis for attempted murder of a superior officer and related offenses, were forgotten until the author resurrected them from the files of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The author's use of source material is exemplary. He relies primarily on secondary sources and, in doing so, offers an exceptional bibliography of law-related materials which would aid students in their own research. Primary materials, from NARA and the military history centers of the Army and Air Force, are used to enrich the text. The National Archives holds the research files created by Marine Lt. Col. Gary Solis as he wrote the definitive legal history of the Marines in Vietnam, Marines and Military Law in Vietnam: Trial by Fire (1989), which Allison mined particularly effectively. His work can serve as a model for researchers revisiting the sources of earlier official histories.

What of the general reader? A former CIA historian once categorized military history as either strategic, tactical, or anecdotal. This book works wonderfully as an anecdotal history of U.S. military lawyers in a particular time and place, enlivened by the reminiscences of veterans whose letters to the author recapture emotions and experiences now forty years past. This is the way the war must have been for the lawyers who participated in it. Their stories, and those of their clients, are a first-class read. At the tactical level, the book faces fierce competition from two books covering the same period and many of the same themes: Solis on the Marines and Maj. Gen. George Prugh on Army lawyers, Law at War, Vietnam 1964-1973 (1975). I have not read Col. Frederic L. Borch's _Judge Advocates in Vietnam: Army Lawyers in Southeast Asia 1959-1975_ (2004). Both traditional institutional histories cover events and individuals in more detail and perforce with less verve than Allison, who, with the exception of the chapter on corrupt practices, does not attempt the same level of analysis and chronology. This book is preferred as a readable brief introduction to the daily legal problems faced by military lawyers in Vietnam.
At the strategic level, the author's ambitions--if any--are unclear. Chapter 1, "A New Code for a Different Kind of War," attempts to describe, in twenty pages, developments in U.S. military criminal justice between 1765 and 1968 without a strong narrative line. There are strategic themes available: evolving notions of "due process," (a slippery term) and the extent to which the criminal justice revolution created by the Warren Supreme Court in the early 1960s should be extended to what the Supreme Court has described as "the separate community" of the armed forces; changing demographics in the armed forces; and the consequences of changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1968. The chapter ends on that note, but the author makes no effort in the following chapters to distinguish pre- and post-1968 developments. Instead, he extends his coverage to the role of military lawyers in country building in Vietnam, without making any judgments about their success or failure.

The conclusion, chapter 8, "Still in the Vanguard," does not succeed as a coda. It starts by describing the last of the Vietnam courts-martial of the turncoat Marine Robert Garwood, then briefly summarizes the 1970s debate over efficacy of the post-1968 military justice system in wartime. Chapter 8 could offer a rich opportunity to comment on recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where investigations of war crimes allegedly committed on patrol require a separate lawyer for each patrol member, and where testimony and physical evidence must be collected, according to strict U.S. due process requirements, under circumstances never imagined by the Supreme Court. The author instead gives a brief, typically one paragraph, description of judge advocates' activities in selected U.S. military operations, such as Urgent Fury (Grenada 1983), Just Cause (Panama 1989), Desert Shield and Desert Storm (Kuwait, 1990-91) and several others, including recent operations in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Inexplicably, Allison does not mention Operations Provide Relief and Restore Hope (Somalia 1992-95). His concluding paragraph, referring to judge advocates' role in nation building, is disappointingly bland and non-judgmental. Perhaps the author had no strategic goal to use U.S. legal experiences in Vietnam as an opportunity to reflect on our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. If that is the case, then we can hope that his undoubted research and writing skills will lead to a sequel.


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

David Carment, Patrick James and Zeynep Taydas. Who Intervenes? Ethnic Conflict and Interstate Crisis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 264 pp. Figures, maps, notes, works cited, index. (cloth), ISBN 0-8142-1013-9.


Reviewed for H-War by Emma J. Stewart, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, UK. Labyrinthine Lessons in Classifying Conflict



This book draws on a tradition of studies in crisis behavior and conflict resolution theory concerned primarily with developing a systematic approach to the study of international conflict.[1] > Carment, James, and Taydas's study is a worthy contribution to this genre; it attempts to understand why some domestic ethnic conflicts lead to interstate crises, and it examines factors impacting on the behavior and intervention strategies of neighboring or regional state actors in ethnic conflict. Contrary to the title, then, this is not an investigation into who intervenes in interstate ethnic conflict. Rather, it is primarily a study of state intervention, in contrast to Carment's other work on international organizations and conflict prevention.[2]
The focus is the interstate dimension of international ethnic conflict. The authors' primary concern is why some ethnic conflicts lead to interstate crisis while others do not. Chapter 1 sets out a convincing case for the study of the neglected interstate dimension of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict with state-to-state interactions is increasingly internationalized, often more violent, can involve more coercive crisis management techniques, and can be more protracted (p. 2). The argument carefully debunks common myths about ethnic conflict. Interstate ethnic conflict is _not_ inevitable; external states may intervene purposefully in ethnic conflict for a variety of > political and material reasons (intervention is rarely, for example, triggered by historical ethnic hatred). Interstate ethnic conflict is not simply a post-Cold War phenomenon (in fact, an increase in ethnic conflict is discernible from the 1960s), and the end of the Cold War was not a significant trigger in the escalation of ethnic conflict. Wary of the limitations associated with labeling conflicts as "ethnic," the authors are careful to stress that "ethnic conflict refers to the form the conflict takes, not its causes" (p. 6).
The framework developed in chapter 2 classifies states intervening in ethnic conflicts as "types," with particular characteristics and strategic objectives, and then tests the propositions about each type against a series of case studies (chapters 3 to 7): the Indo-Sri Lankan crisis of 1983-96; Somalia's post-1960 quest for a "Greater Somalia"; the separatist ambitions of the Malay in southern Thailand; the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s; and the Cyprus conflict. The framework of analysis is outlined, including a typology of intervening states (four types are identified) and a series of propositions about interstate ethnic conflict and crisis to be tested in the case studies. This is a necessary exercise in a priori reasoning, but it is (at least for this reader), often overly complex and impenetrable. The approach and style puts it firmly in a specialist category; one wonders how much use readers outside the conflict resolution field can glean from it.


The five case studies are chosen as examples of complex irredentist or secessionist interstate crises. The study seeks to be comprehensive by its global choice of case studies and its inclusion of a variety of different cultures and religions. Many of the cases span several decades or more, and the authors draw broad conclusions rather than narrowly focusing on one interstate crisis in each case. Unfortunately, the case study chapters are not particularly accessible to the general reader interested in any of the cases. It is a pity that they struggle to stand alone as readable accounts of these crises, since some of the cases are not widely known or studied.


The concluding chapter assesses the framework, summarizes and reaches conclusions on the propositions tested in the case studies, and outlines the policy implications of the results. The authors find support in the case studies for the propositions set out earlier in the study. The theoretical approach taken limits the number of variables and, like all research, makes assumptions about the political world. One key (and problematic) assumption is that state actors and elites behave rationally when intervening in ethnic conflict. This allows the authors to create an ordered account of crisis behavior, and complete the jigsaw by neatly fitting each state into an a priori identified type. While the theoretical approach contributes to the understanding of interstate ethnic intervention, it contributes less to finding solutions to manage or prevent it. This role clearly falls to regional or international organizations, actors whose impact is conspicuously absent throughout the study. The authors admit this as a shortcoming, but the validity of the conclusions would have been greatly increased if the role of other key actors had been integrated into the framework. It is difficult to reconcile the claim to comprehensiveness with this oversight; surely this is a key variable impacting how government leaders behave (for example, in former Yugoslavia, where the decisions of the European Union had a huge effect on how the conflict developed, and the decisions made by leaders).


The concluding chapter, at less than ten pages, is short for a book covering five case studies. More conclusions, as well as detailed policy implications and recommendations, would have been welcome. Nevertheless, overall the book presents a well-constructed thesis on an underresearched topic. It is not, however, particularly accessible to a wide readership, and can be difficult to follow at times. It is debatable, in the end, whether the theoretical model adopted contributes to the comprehensive approach to ethnic conflict that the book advocates. While too many variables may muddy the water, the omission of key ones limits the validity of the conclusions. We come back to the problem faced by all political and social scientists: how do we make sense of, and create order, in the political world without misrepresenting its complexity?

Notes

[1]. In particular the work of Ted Robert Gurr. See also C. F. Hermann, ed., International Crises: Insights from Behavioural Research (New York: The Free Press, 1972); and Graham T. Allison's classic study of crisis decision-making, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

[2]. For example, David Carment and Albrecht Schnabel, eds., Conflict Prevention: Path to Peace or Grand Illusion (Tokyo and New York: United Nations University Press, 2003).


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

Jan Rüger. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xv + 337 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-87576-9.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Jeremy Black, Department of History, University of Exeter

Showing the Fleet

"The maintenance of naval supremacy is our whole foundation. Upon it stands not the Empire only, not merely the great commercial prosperity of our people, not merely a fine place in the world's affairs. Upon our naval supremacy stands our lives and the freedom we have guarded for nearly a thousand years." Winston Churchill's remarks, as First Lord of the Admiralty, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet on November 9, 1911 would have surprised few of his listeners. The sea and ships offered potent images of national mission and strength. Henry Newbolt's popular collections of poetry Admirals All and Others Verses (1897) and The Island Race (1898) linked maritime destiny with manly patriotism, as did Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Revenge (1880). Rudyard Kipling in his Seven Seas (1896) and A Fleet in Being (1899) displayed a shift in interest away from India and towards a maritime concept of empire. Less poetically, over 2.5 million visitors thronged the naval exhibition on the Thames embankment in London in May to October 1891. Three years later, the Navy League was formed in order to orchestrate public pressure for naval strength.

This was part of the competitive navalism of the period, and Rüger, lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, London, is skillful in bringing out the navalism and the competition between Britain and Germany. He focuses on the rituals of fleet reviews and warship launches, and on discussing this staging of power in terms of the definition of national identity in a competitive forging. Thus, alongside practical points about naval development, this is a book about ritual, identity, and the imagination of "the other," one in which consumption, entertainment, and leisure are as significant and causative as government policy. Rüger indeed is particularly good at capturing the way in which the public celebration of the naval power was both forum and force for identity. As he points out, Charles Urban, one of the leading figures in the early British film industry, claimed in 1897 that naval topics ranked highly amongst the most popular subjects in cinematography, with pictures of "naval demonstrations" and the "launching of war vessels" in especially high demand. Cinema, like the press, helped ensure that such occasions could be seen by mass audiences, and helped to make them pubic occasions. Indeed, in 1911, Wilhelm II and the German naval leadership openly acknowledged the extent to which their fleet reviews had changed due to the influence of commercial and media forces, by giving a prominent role to press and pleasure boats.

In Britain, the staging of unity involved much reference to the notion of the island nation. The navy was presented as the natural boundary, spectacle, and defense for this nation. Rüger also shows how the naval stage played an important role in the construction of the empire, with fleet reviews, ship launches, and a range of other displays celebrating the navy as a symbol of imperial unity and strength. This naval staging of the empire expanded greatly from the 1880s, with an increasing frequency and scale of displays, their greater costs, and the transformation of old, and invention of new, ceremonies designed to foster imperial sentiment.

Rüger goes on to argue that this political theater was designed to display power and deterrence. He presents the Anglo-German antagonism as a dramatic game in which important culture issues were bound up with strategic and diplomatic developments. This is a profitable approach and this section is worthy of particular consideration. A lengthy epilogue discusses the fate of British fleet reviews from 1914. The pressures under which the theatre of naval power operated are discussed. More could have been made of the situation since the major fleet review of 1953. Hopefully Rüger will continue the subject in further work.


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

Zeev Maoz. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. xii + 714 pp. Graphs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 0-472-11540-5.

Reviewed for H-War by Eyal Ben-Ari, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

On the Blindness of Hubris and the Folly of Aggression

In a scathing analysis that combines history, theory, and criticism, Defending the Holy Land_ charts the fundamental assumptions underlying Israel's flawed security and foreign policies. It also carefully examines how implementing these policies has, time and again, led to mistakes that have maintained and escalated, rather than reduced, the armed conflicts in which Israel has participated since its inception. In this monumental volume, Zeev Maoz, who teaches at the University of California, Davis, systematically analyzes the mistakes, self-fulfilling prophecies, and appalling judgments that characterize the history of Israeli security operations and foreign policy.
In his preface, Maoz states that he was led to writing Defending the Holy Land because of the persistent failure of Israel's community of policymakers to learn from their mistakes and the uncritical treatment of most Israelis of the foundations of the country's national security doctrine. The overall argument is that Israel's foreign policy is derivative of its security policy so that considerations centering on military power, a deterrent stance toward the Arabs, and the internal domestic importance of supporting tough measures have come to dominate almost all thinking about accommodation with the country's neighbors. Throughout the volume, and especially towards its end, Maoz makes prescriptive comments and suggestions about how to improve policymaking in the country and develop the institutional ability of decision makers to understand the political reality of the Middle East.

The volume, as a whole, is well written (if lengthy) and marked by a systematic and fair attempt to tackle conventional, scholarly, and political wisdom about security matters and foreign affairs issues. Moreover, time and again, Maoz carefully introduces a wealth of empirical data, presents alternative explanations to his own, and offers balanced summaries of all of these contentions. Many arguments that Maoz makes have been made before, but the great strength of Defending the Holy Land_ lies in bringing together and integrating previous scholarship in a succinct and piercing manner. The volume is thus the most comprehensive analysis to date of Israel's national security and foreign policy from the inception of the state of Israel to the present.

Defending the Holy Land engages four interrelated strands of scholarship. First, it examines the ideological literature (going back to David Ben-Gurion but now including such politicians as Shimon Peres or Benjamin Nethanyahu). Next, it engages historical studies that include both conventional treatises and tomes produced by the "new" historians and sociologists. Third, the book assays analytic studies based within the disciplines of political science and international relations. And, finally, Maoz discusses prescriptive studies centered on improving policymaking in Israel. This kind of exceptionally broad-based engagement with the scholarly literature allows Maoz to accomplish a number of tasks. First, he initiates an approach that evaluates the extent to which security and foreign policy have been served by existing doctrines, decisions, and actions. Maoz then uses a critical perspective that challenges many of the fundamental assumptions underlying these policies. And, he integrates hitherto disparate fields into a common frame that links history, theory, policy, and methodology.
Perhaps more broadly, in sociological terms the book's engagement with Israeli history reflects a change in the country's academic generations (which only partially overlap with the wider transformation of social generations). The so-called new historians and sociologists have initiated and developed much of the rethinking of the country's history. These scholars have centered much of their attention on the early years of Israel and the place of the military and security concerns in the processes of nation and state building. While developing his contentions upon the arguments of many of these scholars, Maoz does not uncritically adopt their scholastic jargon or the value judgments underlying many of their treatises. Rather, the tone of Defending the Holy Land is that of a committed but highly critical observer and sometime participant, and is especially evident in the volume's prescriptive parts. Along these lines, Maoz is careful to note that his book is about the Israeli and not the Arab side. He attributes responsibility to the Arabs for the failures to make peace or to work towards accommodation, but makes a convincing case for the shortcomings of Israel. Maoz uses an impressive array of analyses from the whole spectrum of political views, but subjects them all to careful, systematic, and critical readings. And finally, he uses models and frames from the mainstream of political science, international relations, and security studies to carefully examine the case of security and foreign policy.


Defending the Holy Land is divided into five main parts covering fourteen chapters. The different sections often overlap in terms of empirical content, but in each the data is evaluated through different analytical or theoretical prisms. Part 1 outlines the book's analytical foundations by situating it within its scholarly context. This is followed by an outline of the assumptions at the base of the country's security and foreign policy. Part 2 centers on how Israel has used military force over the course of its existence as an independent state. Maoz thus charts the various wars and Israel's experience in Low Intensity Conflict (LIC). Here, the major thrust of the argument is that most of the country's conflicts were the result of deliberately aggressive designs, faulty decision making, or flawed conflict management strategies. Yet despite these developments, Maoz argues that no systematic critical self-reflection has taken place regarding Israeli security policy. One important chapter focuses on the overlooked War of Attrition that occurred between Israel and Egypt between the full- scale engagements of 1967 and 1973. This "forgotten war" was initiated by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and none of its lessons--such as the determination and fortitude of the Egyptian army and its ability to carry out simple maneuvers--were learned by Israeli policymakers. Rather, the War of Attrition was understood through the hubris that overtook the country and its leaders after the victory of 1967.

Part 3 examines Israel's nuclear policy and takes issue with the overwhelming majority of scholars and commentators who have seen it as a success. Marshalling careful empirical data, Maoz, in contrast, argues that this policy was actually not successful since it had a number of adverse side effects, such as accelerating the conventional arms race in the Middle East. Part 4 comprises two chapters focusing on repeated failed attempts by Israel to intervene in the internal affairs of its neighbors for its own strategic ends and the long series of missed opportunities for peace diplomacy. The chapter on interventions in internal Arab affairs--for example, Israel's central role in encouraging the emergence of Hizbulla and Hamas and its fiasco in supporting local Palestinian elections in the 1970s--smack of deep-rooted assumptions held by Israeli leaders that one could chart out and socially engineer developments among Arab social and political entities. This view involves, in part, as Maoz argues in other parts of the book, a simplistic understanding of societies and polities that derives from the fact that most experts in Arab affairs within the country's security establishments have been educated in the history of the Middle East--in Israel, they are called "Orientalists"--rather than in one of the relevant social sciences. Part 5 is a brilliant analysis of the dominance of the security establishment in Israeli political affairs, and argues that no real shift will occur in policy unless the structure of the policymaking machinery is changed. Accordingly, one of Maoz's cutting conclusions is that, except for the war in 1948, all of Israel's wars were the result of deliberate aggressive designs or flawed conflict management strategies orchestrated by leaders marked by militaristic thinking. The various conflicts were thus essentially all wars of choice.

Let me underscore two wider implications of Defending the Holy Land that may interest readers of this review. First, Maoz's analysis reveals that Israel's war strategy was not developed systematically but emerged in piecemeal fashion. Maoz does an excellent job of tracing out the main elements of this set of policies and the assumptions undergirding them.
But, he shows time and again that it was an emergent product rather than an orderly analysis of the reality of Israel, a systematic process of drawing conclusions from this analysis, or a logical procedure for deriving concrete guidelines for action from them. For example, he shows how the process of aggressive responses to Arab activity favored by many in the security community that loose coalition of politicians, administrators, senior commanders, and security experts within and outside of academia often led to the escalation of conflicts and tended to reinforce the communal consensus about the importance of military means to achieve political ends.

Second, Defending the Holy Land bears serious implications for the civilian control of the military and more broadly of the security establishments. Here, Maoz's argument goes beyond the contention that security policy drives foreign policy. He focuses on the politics, bureaucracy, and social structure of the security community to explain the lack of oversight that characterizes Israel, and which is so important because it is the cause of so much folly and the failure to learn from mistakes. Maoz explains this situation through reference to a number of factors, including the overwhelming preponderance of the security community in terms of size, capability, and effectiveness over other (competing) bodies; the weakness of the foreign and diplomatic community and civilian institutions that may offer alternatives to the sole emphasis on military solutions to international conflicts; the significant infusion of security personnel into politics and policymaking bodies and the consequent infiltration of military oriented worldviews into these arenas, and the utter weakness of the legislature and the judiciary in limiting the security community. It is no surprise then that this situation is characterized by what Maoz terms structural militarization or securitization of policymaking in security and foreign affairs.

If I have one criticism of Defending the Holy Land it is that it is too long. At over seven hundred pages, the volume could have easily been edited down to two-thirds of its length. More specifically, in many chapters, Maoz tends to provide empirical details that he supplies in earlier sections. The advantage of this kind of text is that it allows readers to peruse each chapter independently of others. The great disadvantage for someone who reads the whole volume is that it unnecessarily replicates whole sections.

Defending the Holy Land is a very impressive and successful attempt to examine the foundations, guiding principles, and operational expression of Israel's security and foreign policies. It is systematic, integrative, clearly written, empirically based, and theoretically informed. It will become a must read for anyone interested in the conflicts of the Middle East.


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

Robert M. S. McDonald. Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. 233 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-2298-0.


Reviewed for H-USA by Jason Stacy, Department of Historical Studies, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville


Sphinx's Army


America’s sphinx, Thomas Jefferson, is well known for his cryptic statements and contradictory actions. The owner of slaves who enunciated American independence with an appeal to universal human rights, the agriculturalist who built a nail factory at Monticello, the strict constitutionalist who stretched the elasticity of the Constitution to double the size of the republic with a real estate deal he justified as a treaty, all these examples make Jefferson a founder with whom just about any ideal or inclination can feel at home. His complexity was well documented and infamous to political allies and enemies alike. But militarist? Jefferson is remembered as the governor of Virginia who fled his home state during the British invasion of 1781. His reduction of the armed forces and building of a "mosquito navy" after his inauguration seemed in line with his suspicion of large standing armies, especially those built under the direction of the Federalists Hamilton and Adams. His ideal of the citizen soldier seemed to exclude his advocacy of an American martial culture.


Theodore Crackel undermined this version of Jefferson with his seminal work on the subject, Mr. Jefferson's Army (1987). For Crackel, Jefferson, remembered as a founder of the republic and the University of Virginia, was also the forgotten founder of the American tradition of a republican military culture of professionalism and merit.


Robert M. S. McDonald and the authors of Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy further explore Crackel's thesis with great success. According to Don Higginbotham in his chapter "Military Education Before West Point" the foundation of a professional American officer corps was established during the American Revolution. Following a European trend of greater interest in artillery and fortifications, both skills that lent themselves to the engineer's craft, officers in the Continental Army traded European publications with titles like Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field (1775) and Manoeuvres, Or Practical Observations on the Art of War (1770). In fact, a Prussian officer, Johann Ewald, upon investigating captured American haversacks, observed "the most excellent military books. . . . ", including many homemade manuals that officers distributed to their peers (p. 35). American reading habits did not make for a republican military academy, however.

Jefferson's founding of the United States Military Academy was undertaken for reasons more political than ideological. The Military Peace Act, initiated by Jefferson and signed into law in 1802, led to the establishment of the officer's academy at West Point, New York and the restructuring of the military along lines advantageous to Jefferson. In his chapter "The Military Academy in the Context of Jeffersonian Reform", Theodore Crackel argues that the establishment of West Point was part of a broader program by Jefferson to purge the effects of the previous three Federalist administrations and create an officer corps faithful to his Republican ideals (p. 111).


These ideals were inculcated by redefining European concepts of military honor. In the chapter entitled "West Point and the Struggle to Render the Officer Corps Safe for America, 1802-1833," Samuel Watson argues that Jefferson's legacy, via West Point, is that of a civic-minded military. According to Watson, West Point alumni were "an administrative cadre more akin to a national . . . managerial class than any other American social or occupational group prior to the Civil War" (p. 155). This was due largely to Jefferson's appointment of the first superintendent of the academy, Colonel Jonathan Williams. Williams, the chief engineer and inspector of fortifications of the army, established the Corps of Engineers as an elite group within West Point and, therein, inaugurated a culture of technical skill and meritorious advancement in opposition to a European military culture that emphasized individual glory and flamboyant posturing (p. 158). Sylvanus Thayer, who studied at West Point under Williams' tutelage and was the longest-serving superintendent of the academy (1817-1833), is considered the founder of the West Point of popular memory. Thayer, for example, coined the academy's motto "Duty, Honor, Country." During his tenure, these traditional military ideals took on a meaning in line with Jefferson and Williams's republican vision for West Point. According to Watson, duty meant serving civilian authority under the dictates of the Constitution; even when civilian direction ran counter to military good sense. Honor, rather than representing the essential and easily affronted identity of officer-gentlemen, stood for performing one's duties selflessly. One's honor was established through integrity and dedication to the civic whole. Country, then, provided the "focal point" that "concentrated and legitimated graduates' efforts to perform their duties" (p. 169). By professionalizing the officer corps and dedicating it to the very Jeffersonian ideals of merit, technical skill, and dedication to the republic, Thayer completed the process of producing a particularly republican type of military culture.


What, then, accounts for Jefferson's forgotten reputation as the founder of America's premier military academy? Ironically, West Point's institutional amnesia began this forgetting. Robert M. S. McDonald, in a chapter entitled "West Point's Lost Founder," traces the strange story. It began with the removal of Sylvanus Thayer in 1833 as superintendent of the academy by president Andrew Jackson. Jackson perceived the training at West Point to be autocratic and, when a cadet, H. Ariel Norris, placed a hickory pole (a symbol of Jackson) in the middle of the parade ground and was punished by Thayer, Jackson found his excuse to end the "tyranny" of the superintendent. "[T]he autocracy of the Russias couldn't exercise more power!" Jackson exclaimed upon hearing of the cadet's plight (p. 186).

So firmly had Jackson established his Democratic Party as the inheritor of Jeffersonian ideals, Thayer's removal inspired an antipathy toward Jackson that expunged Jefferson from institutional memory. Thereafter, officers like Winfield Scott and Robert E. Lee, both Whigs, perpetuated the myth that the academy was, at least in spirit, founded by George Washington and Henry Knox. In Lee's case, this revision of West Point's origins also had a personal dimension as the Lees and the Jefferson had a rivalry that went back to 1809 when "Light-Horse" Henry Lee was thrown in debtors' prison and blamed his bankruptcy on Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807. Jefferson's reputation at West Point reached its nadir in the nineteenth century when Alfred Thayer Mahan declared that Jefferson's military policies guaranteed "a minimum of military usefulness at a maximum of pecuniary outlay" (pp. 192-193). Jefferson's revival began with the New Deal and the second Roosevelt's egalitarian rhetoric. President Truman, likewise, in support of his Cold War policies, appealed to Jefferson's "hardheaded common sense" in military matters (p. 196). By the late twentieth century, historians like Stephen Ambrose, Thomas Fleming, and Theodore Crackel began to reestablish Jefferson's place in American military history [1].


Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy is a useful book not only for military historians, but also for cultural historians interested in the advent of a very particular American military outlook and the ways in which the U.S. has sought to balance military and civic culture. If I had one request, it would be for a greater analysis of the effect of Jefferson's military academy on American civic culture itself. The authors of this collection do a fine job analyzing the ways in which West Point cadets and officers sought to engage American civic traditions within military training and tradition. It would be worthwhile to analyze the process working in the opposite direction.

However, this might make for another very good book.


[1] Stephen Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Theodore Crackel,
West Point: A Bicentennial History, (Lawrence: The University of Press Kansas, 2003) and Mr Jefferson's Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801-1809, (New York: New York University Press, 1987); Thomas Fleming, West Point: The Men and Times of the United States Military Academy, (New York: William Morrow, 1969).
_________________


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

Irwin M. Wall. Les États-Unis et la guerre d’Algérie, préface de Georges-Henri Soutou, traduit de l’anglais par Philippe-Étienne Raviart. 464 pp. Paris: Éditions Soleb, October 2006. ISBN: 978-2952372619.

Reviewed by Kim Munholland, University of Minnesota, Emeritus
Published by H-Diplo on 10 January 2008

Originally published in 2001 by the University of California Press as France, the United States, and the Algerian War, Irwin Wall’s book was immediately hailed as an important, revisionist account of the war by placing what the French preferred to consider an internal matter into an international context with emphasis upon the crucial relationship between France and the United States. Previous accounts had dealt with the war’s impact on French society, producing a domestic political crisis that ended the Fourth Republic and brought Charles de Gaulle to power. While this national drama and its memory continues to inspire a number of important studies that focus upon the way the war has shaped contemporary French identity, the internationalization of the war was innovative and marked a new dimension to the conflict seen in other contemporary studies that emphasized the significance of the Algerian war for international history.1 In a military sense the French Army had won the battle but they lost the war, due to pressure from the international community, the United Nations, and persistent demands from the United States. Wall argues that American policy was more important than a growing domestic disillusion with the war or protests by intellectuals against the use of torture in convincing de Gaulle to abandon the effort to retain l’Algérie française, but he did so at the cost of his own objectives at the time of his coming to power.

Wall began his research intending to follow up his earlier study, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954. While the sequel under review confirmed his earlier argument about the significance of American influence in shaping postwar France, his research in the archives caused him to revise certain assumptions or hypotheses that he had developed about the way in which the Fourth Republic collapsed as a result of a colonial war and the way de Gaulle’s return would skillfully guide France out of its imbroglio in Algeria. Evidence from the American and recently published French documents challenged these hypotheses.

French documents revealed the extent to which the Algerian conflict dominated French diplomacy from 1954 to 1962, dwarfing all other concerns including the formation of NATO and security in Europe. The Algerian conflict and the French view that Nasser’s support for the FLN was a major obstacle to the French attempt to pacify Algeria led to French engagement in the Suez crisis, which severely tested the recently created NATO alliance. A second issue had to do with the domestic problems and political rivalries that paralyzed the Fourth Republic and prevented it from resolving the Algerian war despite the military success during the 1957 battle of Algiers. As a result the Americans lost interest in preserving the Fourth Republic and actually favored the return of de Gaulle to power, despite the difficult wartime relationship with de Gaulle.

Perhaps the most important of Wall’s revisionist positions was a rethinking of de Gaulle’s policy, particularly during his first two years in office from 1958 to 1960. Until his excursion into American archives and French documents Wall shared the view of Gaullists, who argued that his adroit maneuvers saved France a second time by ending the Algerian conflict, which he intended to do from the moment he came to power, despite the uprising of military officers and colons who had made his return possible and were determined to hold onto Algeria whatever the costs. Many of us, this reviewer included, explained de Gaulle in admiring terms for the way he moved gradually from the Delphic ambiguities of his “Je vous ai compris” speech in Algiers shortly after taking power that was followed by greater concessions leading to his granting independence four years later---to the fury of certain generals and the European settlers, who then tried to assassinate him. Wall argues that de Gaulle was not misleading the crowd in Algiers that day. He agreed with its message of keeping Algeria French. In taking this position, Irwin Wall challenged a generation of Gaullist scholarship that portrays the General in a prescient, heroic mode. In Wall’s account de Gaulle was forced to change his policy once the Americans refused to buy into his grand designs for France in the postwar world.

The reason for de Gaulle’s commitment to a French Algeria, or at least an Algeria closely tied to metropolitan France, was that Algeria was the key to a pan-African and Mediterranean role for France in a world of international politics. As part of this grand design de Gaulle would use France’s African presence to claim a stronger role in the councils of the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly his desire to have France the third partner in a triumvirate within NATO but obviously looking beyond that horizon as well. The Algerian Sahara provided the testing ground for development of nuclear weapons, a program begun under the Fourth Republic. Recent oil discoveries made the Sahara doubly appealing for French military and economic interests. De Gaulle’s Algerian policy, then, represented a continuation of the Fourth Republic’s, not a break at least until 1960. To sustain French Algeria de Gaulle, no less than the Fourth Republic, relied upon American military and economic aid, but the price of this assistance was American pressure upon de Gaulle to begin a liberalization of French policies in Algeria. Instead, de Gaulle allowed the French Army the free hand it wanted to continue its counter-revolutionary war, employing the methods of torture, roundups, resettlement of Muslim populations, and crackdowns upon dissidents and anti-war protesters in France and Algeria.

In his last years in office Eisenhower tried to ease de Gaulle away from preserving Algeria at any cost, and he showed some sympathy for de Gaulle’s desire to speak on equal terms with his Anglo-Saxon partners. But both Kennedy, who was far more determined to see France get out of Algeria, and Eisenhower refused to give de Gaulle any cooperation in the development of nuclear weapons. When de Gaulle realized that he could expect no aid from the United States, only exhortations to relent on Algeria, he decided that he would have to grant Algeria its independence, but then he would pursue a policy of French independence laced with a good dose of anti-Americanism. From the ruins of his grand designs de Gaulle would fashion a course that would lead France out of NATO’s military command in 1966, thus getting some revenge on the Americans who believed that the Algerian war was draining French ability to strengthen NATO in Europe. Wall does not go very far, however, beyond 1962 and the granting of independence on terms that fell far short of what de Gaulle hoped to achieve, leading to tragedy for all concerned: a flight of Europeans from Algiers and a bitter hostility toward France among Algerians. De Gaulle pulled out of Algeria not because of a military defeat—the FLN was reduced to some 15,000 guerilla fighters still in the field—but as a result of international pressures from the United States and international opinion that had turned against France as early as the 1958 Sakiet episode. Although Wall does not make this a central argument, the FLN successfully played its hand in the public relations war that it fought in parallel with the anti-colonial struggle on the ground.

These revisionist points were made in the English version and widely recognized in several reviews in Anglo-American literature. What did the French make of all this? Getting Anglo-American scholarship on France translated into French has been something of a challenge, particularly for those of Irwin Wall’s generation, which was initially under the influence of mentors who argued that American scholars did not have the opportunity that French historians had in gaining access to original, archival sources and therefore could not contribute to basic research on French history. Beginning in the 1960s the separate spheres of French and Anglo-American scholarship began to break down. Transatlantic travel became cheaper and support for research for historians improved. Scholarly exchanges grew, and American works on France reached an interested audience among French scholars. These exchanges were valuable in many fields, but particularly for International relations as Americans combed French archives and French scholars came to America. Still, translation into French or into English for French scholars remained limited. Irwin Wall has been among those American historians of France who have had an influence as a result of translations of his work. His L’influence Américaine sur la politique française 1945-1954 (also translated by Philippe-Étienne Ravieart) appeared before the English version, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954. It took Wall longer to get the French translation of his book on the Algerian War, evidence of the publishing industry’s reluctance to invest in translations of topics that they consider to have limited audience appeal, but at least the author was successful, thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of a young publishing company, Éditions Soleb..

The translation is an elegant job that remains faithful to the original. However, in the interim between the American and French version a number of events have intervened, notably the emergence of a more critical literature on de Gaulle2 and, of course, the war in Iraq, which produced a crisis in French-American relations. For the French edition Irwin Wall has added a postscript “Fifty Years Later” that discusses French-American differences in light of the Iraq war and French opposition to a precipitous American invasion, which several commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have seen to be a deep and perhaps fatal crisis for the relationship. Wall brings some perspective to this argument by noting that despite an alliance in two world wars, the relationship has always been difficult, and the blowup over Iraq in 2003 was not appreciably worse than, say, relations at the end of the Fourth Republic when American disgust with the instability of the regime was matched by French anti-Americanism and resentment. At this point Wall states that relations could hardly have become worse. (111)

The comparison between the Algerian and Iraq wars reveals both parallels and divergences. Both could be considered occupations of Muslim lands that produced violent reactions against Western forces. Both occupying forces had recourse to torture to defeat terrorism but without success in ending resistance to the occupations. Chirac, as de Gaulle before him with Vietnam, tried to warn the Americans by citing the French experience. Bush and his advisors were aware of the French experiences but drew the wrong lessons. The differences are also instructive and reveal the ways in which international politics has changed during the past fifty years. In Algeria the French had the support of the Europeans, who constituted one-tenth of a population of some nine million inhabitants and an army of elite troops plus draftees totaling over 500,000 troops. The American invasion force never surpassed 160,000, plus British support and troops sent by the ‘coalition of the willing’ to maintain security in a population of 25 million Iraqis. There were no colons to support the American-led invasion. The French argued that they were preserving a colony, which they insisted was part of France, whereas the Americans were invading a sovereign state.

The Algerian war came in the midst of the Cold War when the French were still dependent upon an American nuclear umbrella. In addition, the Americans financed eighty percent of the French war in Algeria with supplies and equipment that otherwise might have been used to strengthen NATO. By the time of Iraq the bipolar world was gone for over a decade with the emergence of American military dominance and American actions that became increasingly unipolar and indifferent to international opinion. Chirac noted with some regret that ‘l’Amérique du Papa’ was gone. In many ways the French and American roles were reversed, at least from the time of the Suez crisis in which Eisenhower opposed the Suez venture in favor of multilateralism at the UN and an appeal to a respect for the rule of international law to force the Israeli, British and French troops to withdraw. At Suez the French were fighting Arab nationalism and Nasser’s support for the FLN. The French wanted regime change in the ways that the Americans, among other less plausible arguments, were seeking to topple Saddam Hussein. In Suez the Americans won their point at the UN and stopped France and Great Britain. In the buildup to the Iraq war France tried but failed to deter the United States even with the support of Germany, Russia and China. France’s position was that war should only be a last resort, not a preventive strike, and like Eisenhower in 1956 Chirac mobilized international opinion against the United States. Nevertheless the American plunge into Iraq went forward, revealing the contours of the new rules of international behavior as defined in Washington.

How, then, did the French respond to the critique of de Gaulle and, in the post face, the contrasts in roles played by the United States and France in the Algerian conflict and in the Iraq war? The answer is that Les États-Unis et la guerre d’Algerie has caught their attention at least in the revisionism on de Gaulle’s role in ending the conflict and his subsequent decision to regain French independence and room to oppose the United States. Among the reviews of Irwin Wall’s book in French was a favorable notice by Éric Roussel in Le Figaro that appreciated the contribution of Wall’s revisionism and his willingness to challenge orthodox opinion, whether on Algeria or Iraq. American and French scholars have discovered that when it comes to bilateral relations or international history, they have much to offer each other, whether or not statesmen are prepared to pay attention to what they have to say.




Author’s Response by Irwin Wall, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside and Visiting Scholar, NYU Published by H-Diplo on 10 January 2008

There is little an author can do, other than say thank you, when a reviewer summarizes his work with admirable clarity and accepts for the most part its conclusions, however controversial. And so in these few words I will neither nitpick with Kim Munholland’s wonderful job nor blow my own horn any further than he has done. He did raise the issue of
the reception of the book in France, however, and that raises some interesting additional questions that I thought H-Diplo readers might find of interest. The book was reviewed extremely favorably here and in England when it came out in 2001, with most scholars accepting its conclusions. Ditto for Matt Connelly’s book, A Diplomatic Revolution, which came out a year later, and took a similar view of de Gaulle. The dissenters in my case were Stanley Hoffmann, in Foreign Affairs, not surprising, since I questioned his view of de Gaulle as consummate political artist, rather depicting him as a stubborn pursuer of failed policies, and Richard Vinen in the TLS, who thought I had little new to say, or rather that I said what he knew all the time. The most enthusiastic favorable reviewer was the H-Diplo reviewer then, Bill Irvine, and I invite readers to check his review out along with that of Kim Munholland.3

I did not expect the same reception in France, where I was taking on some strongly-held beliefs and where the de Gaulle reverence has assumed the status of a national myth. Indeed, I had a foretaste: H-France gave the book to Romain Souillac of the University of Bordeaux, and he took me to task for over-emphasizing the importance the American attitude toward the war in France, and neglecting the strong evidence that indicates that de Gaulle intended all along to emancipate Algeria from French rule. In short Souillac ably defended the existing
historiography.4 In a review of the American edition in the Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol also complimented my scholarship, and then argued similarly that de Gaulle intended to leave Algeria. I expected more of the same therefore from the appearance of the French edition. When the French edition came out I held my breath, and I read with great pleasure the review of Eric Roussel, which Munholland mentions, in Le Figaro Littéraire. Roussel was willing to admit that I had perhaps made my case based on the archival materials thus far; but he thought that not everything was in the
archives. Hopefully more will one day be uncovered, especially when the General’s papers see the light of day, but it is hard for me to imagine that something other than what appears in French diplomatic documents with regard to Algeria will emerge; but until then I think my argument can stand. There was also a mention of my book by Jean Daniel, in an editorial in Le Nouvel Observateur, but he did not address Algeria, rather my postscript on Iraq, finding there confirmation of evolving opposition to the American war there by American opinion (hardly representative, alas, in my case). But for the rest of the French media, which generously reviewed my earlier book, The United States and the Making of Postwar France in its French version, there has been stony silence. Not for lack of my publishers trying; we hosted a luncheon for the major publications, and most of them did send reporters to hear what I had to say. They seem to have been unimpressed, by me and by the book. I get two explanations from French colleagues: that the Gaullist myth is so widely believed that contrary views are rejected out of hand as unworthy of notice, and that worse, the major press, in crisis, no longer devotes as much space as before to reviewing academic books. Even the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, which enthusiastically reviewed my earlier book, ignored this one; I was told by someone highly placed that the Gaullist myth holds sway even there.

In fact the sole favorable review of the book in French (and the very best one) is not a review; it is the introduction to the French edition by Georges-Henri Soutou. On the other hand there was a very lengthy diatribe in an obscure publication the politics of which I find it hard to discern: De Defensa, which is published in Belgium. The reviewer, whom I assume was the editor, accuses me of being a spokesman for the American system which I objectify into the incarnation of virtue and use live up to Washington’s expectations. In fact I am the inventor of a new kind of history, partisan “Americanist” history and values objectified, “le parti-pris objectif ou l’objectivation partisan,” which I take to mean the imposition of American—indeed pro-American government—standards and views upon the world. The same reviewer dismisses my comparison of the Iraq and Algeria wars and the contrasting roles France and the United States as unworthy of notice, although I make it perfectly clear that I identify with the French policy during the Iraq war, not the American. I can only express my astonishment; being an apologist for American imperialism is the last thing of which I ever thought anyone would accuse me, but I did write a book in which Eisenhower, during a crisis over decolonization, despite his limitations, comes off better than de Gaulle.

I await the academic reviews in France which will take more time. In the meantime the lesson I take from all this is that the Franco-American divide, in diplomacy and in Weltanschauung, exists as well in scholarship, at least with regard to de Gaulle.


Notes

1 Martin Thomas, The French North African Crisis: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945-1962 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Mathew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and an important volume of essays edited by Martin Alexander and J.F.V. Keiger, France and the Algerian War, 1954-1962 (London: Frank Cass, 2002).

2 See, for example, Éric Roussel, Charles de Gaulle (Paris, Gallimard, 2002).

3 William D. Irvine. “Review of Irwin M. Wall, France, the United States and the Algerian War,” H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews, May, 2002.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=211021023296606 .


4 Romain Souillac. “Review of Irwin M. Wall, France, the United States and the Algerian War,” H-France Review Vol. 2 (March 2002), No. 30. http://www.h-france.net/vol2reviews/souillac.html
_________________


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## LibraryLady (Feb 13, 2008)

archade,

I'm a little confused by the title of this thread.  The books you've listed are all published in the US.

Questions:

Is this a required reading list of books in your military?  If so, is it possible to put the entire list in one post without the reviews?

Are they books you found illuminating/interesting?  Is so, could you post your own reviews instead of someone else's?  Personally, I'd appreciate your own words rather than a professional review.  As a librarian, here are my personal feelings about professional reviews - they are designed to sell a book, nothing more.  I like to see reviews on mil boards that are the members own words, as you guys are on the ground and in the suck - your impressions could vary considerably from the pro reviews.

LL


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

I'm a little confused by the title of this thread.  The books you've listed are all published in the US.

the title is just a funny title as I could chose "the cave of the french grunt" or the "gold tavern" nothing more.

Questions:

Is this a required reading list of books in your military?  If so, is it possible to put the entire list in one post without the reviews?

It isn't. I receive this summaries by newsletter. I thought it could be useful for anyone to glance at this summuries en order to have a general idea of the book. 
I only posted the english reviews for obvious reasons. I could edit french reading list if you are really interested in. 
I'm not sure that everyone could read the french and our reading list is not so exciting. Books are dealing with strategic problems not tactics one. So there aren't so much lessons learned turned in books from the french military. the few are based on first and second world war.


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

dear LL,

Our military reading list is divided into four main threads

Art of war
Man and war
Society and war
Sciences and war

Into those four threads you will find all those following books. In theory those books should be the basis of the French officers military knowledge. Actually french commissioned officers aren’t ought to read all of them, only some of them in depend of their decision levels.

Sorry for my english level

You already know some of them because this is only translating books for France (Creveld, Keegan, Grau...)

_Tactique théorique_, colonel Yakovleff, Economica, 2006 (ISBN 2717852654) ;

_L’infanterie attaque, enseignements et expérience vécue_, Erwin Rommel, PIR EAI Montpellier ;

_L'Heure H, Etapes d'infanterie 14-18_, J. Tezenas du Montcel, VALMONT 1960, P.I.A.T. – S.M. – 01-0003 ;

_Orage d’acier_, Ernst Jünger (ISBN 2267-00281-7);

_Notre histoire_, Hélie de Saint-Marc & August von Kageneck, J'ai lu, (ISBN 2290-336866) ;

_Les Champs de braise_, Hélie Denoix de Saint-Marc, Perrin, 1995 (ISBN 2-262011184) ;

_L’homme en guerre 1901-2000. De la Marne à Sarajevo, Philippe Masson, Collection l’art de la guerre, éditions du Rocher, 1997 (ISBN : 2-2680-2381-8) ;

Anatomie de la bataille, John Keegan, Robert Laffont, Pocket, Coll. Agora, 1993 (ISBN 2-266-00137-X) ;

Les Soldats de la Grande Guerre, Jacques Meyer, Hachette Littératures, 1998 (ISBN 2-01-2354416) ;

Etudes sur le combat, Combat antique et combat moderne, colonel Ardent du Picq, Editions Economica (ISBN 2717848193) ;

Les principes de la guerre, maréchal Foch, Imprimerie nationale, Paris, 1996 ;

Histoire de l' armée française de 1914 à nos jours, Philippe Masson, Tempus Perrin. 2002 (ISBN 2-262-01888-X) ;

L’Art de la guerre par l’exemple, Frédéric Encel, Flammarion, Champs, 2000, (ISBN 2-08080035-3) ;

La Société militaire de 1815 à nos jours, Raoul Girardet, Librairie Académique Perrin, 1998 (ISBN 2-262-01276-8) ;

Honneur et patrie, Lucien Febvre, Agora, Pocket,(ISBN 9782266092401) ;

La guerre en montagne, de Courrèges-Givre-Le Nen, Economica , 2006 (ISBN 2-7178-5327-8) ;

Trente-six stratagèmes, Jean-François Phelizon, Economica, Paris, 2001 (ISBN 2-7178-4142-3) ;

Principes fondamentaux de la stratégie, Carl von Clausewitz, Edition Mille et une nuits, 2006 (ISBN 2-84205-971-9) ;

Pour une éthique du métier des armes, vaincre la violence, général Bachelet. Editions Vuibert (ISBN 2 7117 7297 2) ;

Counterinsurgency warfare, theory and practice, Patrick Galula ( ISBN-10 : 027 599 3108 ; ISBN-13 : 978-0275993108);

Théorie du combat, Carl von Clausewitz, Economica (ISBN 2-7178-3736-1) ;

La guerre des Boers, Bernard Lugan, Perrin (ISBN 2-2620-0712-8) ;

La bataille des monts Nementcha (Algérie 1954-1962) un cas concret de guerre subversive et contre-subversive, Dominique Farale, Economica ;
Alger – été 1957 : une victoire sur le terrorisme, Général Maurice Schmitt, L’Harmattan, 2002 (ISBN 2-7475-1977-5) ;

The bear went over the mountain, Lester W. Grau Frank Cass, London, Portland – Oregon 1998 (ISBN 071464413-7);

Na San, la Victoire oubliée (1952-1953), Base aéroterrestre au Tonkin », Jacques Favreau – Nicolas Dufour, Economica, collection « Campagnes et stratégie », 1999 (réimpression 2000) ;

Stalingrad, Antony Beevor Editions de Fallois, (ISBN-10: 287706350X ISBN13: 978-2877063500) ;

La chute de Berlin, Antony Beevor, Editions de Fallois (ISBN-10: 2877064395 ISBN-13: 978-2877064392).

Combat team, John F. Antal, Presidio Press, Novato, California 94945 (ISBN 089141-635-8) ;

Great military blunders, Jeoffrey Regan, Channel 4 Books, London, 2000 (ISBN 0-7522-1898-0) ;

Soldat de guerre, soldat de paix, général Jean Salvan, Edition Italiques – 2005 (ISBN 2-910-536610) ;

L’utilité de la force, général Ruppert Smith, Economica, 2007, ISBN 978-2-7178-5366-7 ;

Introduction à la stratégie_, général André Beaufre, collection Pluriel, Hachette Littératures, 1998 ;

_La chair et l'acier_, L'invention de la guerre moderne 1914 – 1918, LCL Michel Goya Taillandier, Paris, 2004 ;

_La transformation de la guerre_, Martin van Creveld, Editions du Rocher, 1998 (ISBN 2 268 028984) ;

_Stratégie_, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Perrin, 1998 (ISBN 2-262-01373-x) ;

_Comprendre la guerre_, général Vincent Desportes, Economica 2001 (ISBN 2-7178-4286-1) ;

_L’étrange défaite_, Marc Bloch, 1990 (ISBN 207-0325695) ;

_Précis de l’art de la guerre_, Baron de Jomini, Perrin, 2001 (ISBN 2-262-01530-9) ;

_Décider dans l’incertitude_, général Vincent Desportes, Economica, 2004 (ISBN 2-7178-4893-2) ;

_Cobra II_ ,Gordon Trainor, Michael Atlantic Books, 2006 (ISBN 1843543524);

_Le mythe de la guerre éclair_, K. H. Frieser, Belin 2003(ISBN 2-7011-2689-4).


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## archade (Feb 13, 2008)

Robert H. Ferrell. America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xii + 195 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1499-8.

Reviewed for H-War by Mark E. Grotelueschen, Department of History, U.S. Air Force Academy

Blundering to Victory

In the past decade or so the distinguished American historian Robert H. Ferrell has turned his attention to World War I, writing at least three monographs on the U.S. war effort and editing at least that many volumes of recently discovered soldiers' memoirs. America's Deadliest Battle is the latest product of this prolificacy, and this volume may be the capstone to this impressive contribution to the scholarly investigation of one of America's less studied wars. As Ferrell points out, although the Meuse-Argonne was the scene of one of the longest (47 days and bloodiest (26, 277 killed) of all American battles, few scholars have taken the time to research and tell the story of this enormous, horrific, and ultimately victorious campaign. Beyond Frederick Palmer's early but substantial Our Greatest Battle (1919), we have thus far only had Paul Braim's thin _The Test of Battle: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (1987), which was a less detailed examination of the campaign than the title suggested. All this goes to show that if there is something to be gained from thorough histories of campaigns and battles (and I suspect most readers of H-War agree that there is), the Meuse-Argonne was long overdue for a good scholarly examination.

Ferrell attempts to accomplish two important tasks in this work. First, well aware of the apparent lack of interest in and knowledge of this tremendous battle, Ferrell has organized and written this book in a way that seems geared toward the general reader rather than the World War I scholar. In less than 160 pages, Ferrell tells the story of this massive campaign. He includes two brief introductory chapters--one on the inefficient U.S. mobilization effort and another on American Expeditionary Forces' (AEF) operations prior to the Meuse-Argonne--but carefully connects those discussions to the great battle that helped end the war. The remaining seven chapters move through the battle more or less chronologically and geographically, and are filled with personal sketches of important people and vignettes of individual soldiers and units, some of which will be familiar to many (the Lost Battalion, Alvin York) while others will be almost certainly new to all. He touches on the logistical effort, medical operations, air support, unit training, communications capabilities, weapons usage, command styles, controversies between commanders, and the common soldier's experience. Whether or not they agree that the five-day ordeal of the 35th Division at the start of the offensive warrants an entire chapter, most readers unfamiliar with the battle and the AEF will find the story interesting and well told.

The second task Ferrell sets out to accomplish is to explain why the battle was so deadly for the AEF. His conclusions are generally reasonable and well supported, although perhaps not as thorough or comprehensive as more informed readers would like. Ferrell concludes that among the factors external to the AEF, Woodrow Wilson's poor management of the mobilization effort (especially the ship-building campaign) and the War Department's poor management of the unit mobilization and training effort led to numerous problems in the battle. Within the AEF, Ferrell notes that numerous soldiers suffered due to poor leadership at various levels (from young inexperienced officers, to poor division commanders such as the 79th's Joseph Kuhn and the 35th's Peter Traub, right on up to AEF Commander-in-Chief General John Pershing). Others were the victims of poor tactics, especially regarding artillery employment and the failure to use gas. The battle also turned into a bloodbath at times due to inadequate attention to logistical, transportation, and communication requirements. Although most readers will be convinced that Ferrell's conclusions are correct, those more familiar with the AEF may also suspect there is more to the story.
In his haste to keep the story moving briskly, Ferrell rarely dwells on issues that seem to warrant further discussion. One such issue is the nature and extent of the training soldiers and units received in the United States and in Europe. Ferrell discusses the inadequate training of a few units and the scandalous lack of training given to some individual replacements, but he does not discuss the general War Department or AEF training programs sufficiently. The general failures of these programs, both in the quantity and the quality of the training given to practically every AEF unit and soldier, warrant more thorough discussion in any explanation of the troubles experienced in the battle. Similarly, although Ferrell begins to explain the impact of Pershing's fateful agreement with Allied generalissimo Ferdinand Foch in early September to initiate both the St. Mihiel battle on 12 September and the Meuse-Argonne offensive less than two weeks later, much more could be said about this. Pershing's willingness to attempt to fight two enormous battles in two different sectors of the line with the same field army, all within a two-week period, and with only a few weeks to accomplish all the planning, organizing, and preparing necessary to make the latter attack come off at all, much less succeed, had a tremendous impact on the battle.

World War I scholars may also be disappointed with Ferrell's neglect of some other factors that certainly influenced the battle, and especially the numbers of American casualties, such as the incredibly aggressive nature of the initial attack plan and the extent of the German resistance. Nowhere does Ferrell mention that the plan for the initial assault of September 26 demanded that the attacking units break through the German lines faster, and carry their attacks further, than any Allied units had proven able to do thus far in the war. Pershing and his staff demanded this, despite the requirement to push the attack through terrain much more difficult than anything the AEF had yet seen, terrain that the Germans had spent years turning into a veritable fortress and were determined to defend. This latter point--the German defense--is a second subject Ferrell leaves out of his story. With the exception of a good discussion of the German artillery that pounded American soldiers from the heights of the Meuse and the Argonne, this account rarely examines the German half of the battle.

Despite these criticisms, Robert Ferrell's book has much to recommend it. It is an interesting, informative, and briskly written story that should appeal to anyone interested in military history who wants to know more about this neglected but important battle. It will also be of great use to World War I scholars. Ferrell has mined an impressive array of archival records and personal papers, and provided readers with the best-researched account of the battle yet written. If scholars come away wishing the book was twice as long and contained more detailed analysis of some key issues (as I did), then they can thank Ferrell for beginning a scholarly historiography of an important event that is long overdue, and take his apparent omissions as a charge to continue down the path he has finally, at long last, laid down as the challenge for other scholars to follow.


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## car (Feb 13, 2008)

LibraryLady said:


> archade,
> 
> I'm a little confused by the title of this thread.  The books you've listed are all published in the US.
> 
> ...



Not reviews, French Cliff notes.....;)


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## archade (Feb 19, 2008)

David Axe. Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. 111 pp. Illustrations. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-660-6. 


Reviewed for H-War by Michael S. Neiberg, Department of History, University of Southern Mississippi 
Not Quite Ernie Pyle 

We have all seen those "Bad Hemingway" contests that pass through our email accounts from time to time. Think of this book as a medal winner in a "Bad Ernie Pyle" contest. The idea behind the book is noble enough. David Axe, a freelance journalist and graphic novel memoirist, set out to follow the experiences of several members of the Gamecock Battalion of Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets from the University of South Carolina. He purportedly wanted to see why they joined and get a sense of how their lives differed both from their non-ROTC peers and cadets at the United States Military Academy (USMA). He developed a certain sense of admiration for the cadets and the tasks they must complete, but the book ultimately fails to achieve any of its stated aims. 

Although a number of journalists have made names for themselves writing history, this book suffers from a common problem journalists experience when dealing with the past. The "history" portion of the book is limited to a few pages replete with generalities and broad-brush history. According to Axe, nothing in history was "complicated" until September 11, 2001. As part of this uncomplicated pre-9/11 history, Axe claims that ROTC was born on the battlefields of World War I. It is true that the enabling legislation that created ROTC was signed in 1916, but Americans had yet to declare their belligerency in the war, let alone see a single battlefield. This error is indicative of a lack of any serious attempt to understand the book's central subject. The Reserve Officer Training Corps, and the ideal of the citizen-soldier in America more generally, have rich and illuminating histories that might have provided some important perspective, but the book has no real research and no footnotes. 

The book's style obviously is designed to make for light reading. Most of the time, the style is too light and breezy. Several paragraphs are formed with one sentence, in some cases only a single word. Tenses change frequently, there is an annoying tendency to use fragments, and an unnecessary habit of using profanity in order, one presumes, to add a dose of realism through the inclusion of soldier's language. The end result, however, is unsatisfying. We also get descriptions like the one of a helicopter's arrival sounding like "the world's largest grandmother beating the world's largest dirty rug in fast forward" (p. 17) and a crass description of the mothers of cadets fanning themselves in a hot student union during a graduation ceremony as being "like fat hummingbirds" (p. 109). 


Most fundamentally, however, this book misunderstands ROTC and its differences from USMA. Axe's description of ROTC is a "boys (and sometimes girls) will be boys" world of booze-filled partying, challenging military training, and the difficulties of adjusting to the capricious and arbitrary nature of Army life. Axe admires the men and women who endure these hardships, but he does not seem to know that none of these characteristics is unique to ROTC, as any student or faculty member at the nation's military colleges can attest. Instead of a sober analysis of how ROTC cadets are (or think they are) different from their West Point peers, we get a series of vignettes about the challenges of ROTC and how a handful of its students deal with them. 

If a breezy style and a half-considered history of the ROTC program were the book's only faults, Army 101 could be dismissed as too short and too light for a serious comparison of commissioning sources. But there are much deeper flaws. With his wide brush, Axe tars ROTC graduates of traditional military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Virginia Tech, and the Citadel as not being true citizen soldiers like the graduates of the University of South Carolina's ROTC program. Instead, they are all "reactionary brutes without the benefit of West Point's high standards of professionalism" (p. 42). African American women are depicted as unable to perform the physical tasks demanded of them, although there is no analysis to back the assertion (p. 70). > Worst of all is the dismissal of the Abu Ghraib scandal as a function of the fact that the military's "definition of fun doesn't always gibe with everyone else's" (p. 30), a statement that is an insult to service personnel (ROTC and service academy products alike) who see a lot of things in Abu Ghraib, but not humor. After all, ROTC is supposed to provide an exposure to civilian norms that prevents its graduates from completely adopting the military mindset and all of its less pleasant associations. 

Ernie Pyle, whose style is an obvious influence on Axe, made his name with touching, personalized descriptions of American soldiers in the Second World War. Perhaps it is then fitting to conclude this review by noting that whereas Pyle was careful to let his readers get a sense of GIs and the places they came from, Axe changed names and created what he calls composites out of several of his characters. The ensuing picture struck one Gamecock Battalion cadet as so inaccurate that he posted a stinging rebuke on the Internet. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Ernie Pyle deserves better.


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## archade (Feb 20, 2008)

Peter Sluglett. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 318 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4. 


Reviewed for H-Albion by Priya Satia, Department of History, Stanford University 


Lessons in Imperialism from Iraq's Past 


The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq's history. As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue of his thirty-year-old classic, Britain in Iraq, his happiness about the book's new lease of life is severely undercut by his awareness of its unhappy cause. (One at once anticipates and dreads a similar resurrection of long-neglected works on Iranian history in the near future.) While the continued obscurity of important historical texts underscores the ignorance guiding the prosecution of American war and diplomacy in the Middle East, the irony lies as much in the pedagogue's self-defeatist awareness that if only such books had been read in the halls of power earlier, they would have remained neatly irrelevant to our wider political life. 


That said, the timely reissue of Sluglett's book is an opportunity to comment on scholarship as much as politics, and that is, happily, a notably less pathetic story. Sluglett's original 1976 edition has long been the definitive text on the period of the British mandate in Iraq, from World War I to 1932. Initially published by the Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College in Oxford, the book provides the most complete and meticulous narrative of the formation of mandate policy in the tight space framed by British imperial interests and the political survival of its local collaborators, the Baghdadi political clique centered on King Faysal. The book offers "an assessment of Anglo-Iraqi relations and of Britain's role in Iraqi affairs during the period of the British occupation and mandate" with a view to making sense of "developments in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iraq" (p. xv). It provides an engaging and lucid portrait of the complex negotiations, politics, and imperial bureaucracy at the heart of the story. The diplomatic and domestic political pressures on local officials, their supervisors, the multiple imperial centers--Sluglett keeps all the pieces in play. The ad hoc and contingent nature of this chapter of imperial history is pressed home, with the light touch of a humane and wise chronicler. Sluglett presents with clarity and patience the intricacies of the entangled questions of oil, borders, and state finances. Five chronological chapters detailing the evolution of mandate policy are followed by three thematically focused chapters on land policy, defense, and education. Appendices on Shi'i politics and tenurial arrangements in the single province of Amara provide further close grain. 


Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked  Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development. 
In 2007, however, the very coupling of the "interdependence" analytical framework with the book's anticolonial politics produces a peculiar schizophrenia: the crescendoing pathos of the theme of concealed imperial power at times sits awkwardly with a framework that implies a moral equivalence between the British and the Iraqi ruling cliques. It is a framework that tends to sweep as much history under the musty carpet of high politics as it airs in the fresh light of 1970s radicalism. What emerges is a picture of a venal, opportunistic cabal of Iraqi politicians challenging the entirely natural presumptions of the British imperial state. Take the depiction of King Faysal's position: early on, Sluglett explains that Faysal's problem was that he was dependent on Britain but had to "appear to oppose the most demeaning aspects of British control" (p. 42). However, this summarizing statement writes out a score of facts revealed on subsequent pages detailing Faysal's actual, and not merely politically calculated, criticism of British rule; his enduring confusion about the extent of his liberty; and his repeated efforts to interfere with what he increasingly recognized as British imperial designs on his adopted country. In other words, in many instances, he _really did_ resist British demands and was not merely "forced ... into the position of having to seem to resist British demands" (p. 49). The interdependence argument makes the Iraqi government and British state appear equal partners in an illusion perpetrated on the rest of Iraq, while the facts of Sluglett's story suggest that the Iraqi government played politics with considerably greater faith than its British counterparts: when asked to visit Europe in 1927, Faysal assumed he was being summoned to finally receive the gift of full independence, but, in fact, the invitation was merely a ploy to get him out of Baghdad and arrest his interference with British objectives. A measure of the stress under which this inchoate monarchy was struggling is provided by the 1929 suicide of Prime Minister 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Sa'dun, gesturing at a decidedly more sinister politics of empire than "interdependence" can allow. 

>  If, as Sluglett explains, Britain was obstinate about safeguarding its interests and the Iraqi government equally persistent about obtaining"'true' independence" (pp. 108, 119), these are certainly not ethically equivalent objectives. To admit as much is not to excuse the many crimes and failures of the Iraqi government but to attempt to better understand the kind of political context in which such failed, failing, or doomed-to-fail colonial and postcolonial states evolve. Stubbornness, however unproductive, can be admirable in some circumstances and indefensible in others. If the British were bent on preserving their imperial air route, oil fields, Royal Air Force training ground, prestige, and investments, there is surely cause to consider the legitimacy of this objective vis-á-vis the Iraqi government's foolhardy attempts to appear independent of the empire that had created it and foster a real sense of "national solidarity" (pp. 63-64). It was not the Iraqi government's idiosyncratic "weaknesses" that caused it to fail but its very nature as the spawn of indirect rule (p. 64). In short, there is analytical room here for considering structural causes--collaboration, indirect rule, anticolonialism--rather than pointing at individual Iraqi politicians' taste for acquiring land and tax exemptions. (If anything, the British government's imposition of 
iniquitous and extractive financial obligations on Iraq, here painted as the "natural" pursuit of interests [p. 160], merits even greater condemnation on the counts of greed and venality.) The book's analysis of minority and defense policy, in particular, is marred by finger-pointing at an Iraqi government that seems frequently to be elided with the machinery of the Iraqi state, which it neither created nor controlled. In the end, if most Iraqis were losers, as Sluglett sympathetically concludes, the blame for their massive suffering surely does not lie equally on the shoulders of the ruling clique and the British; the one may have struggled vainly against leviathan, but the other was leviathan.


The book's organization tends to amplify the political dissonance produced by its analytical framework. In the blow-by-blow account of mandate policy in the first five chapters, the Iraqi position, like the British, is represented as a product of the naked calculation of political interest; but the brutality, exploitation, and injustices revealed in the final three thematic chapters on revenue policy, security, and education belie such evenhandedness. For instance, early references to the Iraqi government's revenue liabilities are cast in an entirely different light in the later chapters' depiction of the oppressive tax regime and violent methods of collection put in place by the British--although here, too, Sluglett emphasizes that this ugly end was the unintended consequence of misguided British policy rather than the inevitable result of destructive processes deliberately set in motion by a self-interested imperial state; if anyone was culpable, it was, again, the Iraqi government. Part of the problem lies in the obscurity of the moment in which those processes were put in motion the wartime occupation. Although the book purports to start in 1914, the conquest of Iraq receives short shrift. But, in fact, the exacting taxation system, the ecological changes wrought by "development" of the river system, and the violent postwar rebellion (which barely appears until p. 147) were all shaped by the exigencies of war. A more defined  portrait of that era might have helped readers, and Sluglett, make better sense of Iraqi attitudes toward the British presence. Indeed, it is only in one brief moment near the end of the chronological account that Sluglett mentions British fears of tribal rebellion dating from the 1920 experience as a guiding principle in policymaking, but, in fact, that fear is central to understanding the history of the entire decade. 


In the end, from the supposedly objective analysis of interdependent political interests emerges a portrait skewed in a surprising direction for a book so clearly anticolonial in its political commitments: the sins of the British state are the sins of omission and unintended consequences; the sins of the Iraqi government are ... sins. The trouble is that the book's politics are at odds with its traditional methodology. This failing was not only understandable in 1976 but imparted an avant-garde feel to the entire enterprise, as did the old rough-hewn typeface. But, in 2007, the uncritical use of British sources to represent Iraqi perceptions jars--especially when it is done with a view to making an argument about interdependence that might have been agreeable enough to some contemporary British officials. One wishes the revised text might have excised the traces of an era less sensitive to the constraints of working from an imperial archive (however sympathetic to colonial peoples), such as uncritical reproduction of British assessments of endemic "intertribal skirmishing," a people " 'naturally lawless and averse to paying taxes,'" and insincere Iraqi nationalism and Kurdish solidarity (pp. 152, 157). 


For 1976, Sluglett did more than his share, and his book remains the indispensable, finely grained account of policy in mandatory Iraq. He gestured at a new type of imperialism in the making in Iraq, one that traded formal and even indirect control for something more discreetly menacing and that dispensed with the civilizing mission just when that mission had reached its apotheosis as the legitimate task of international institutions like the League of Nations. While outlining the contours of this new type of empire and the circumstances that made it possible, he stopped short of naming it or identifying it as the unfolding of a particular historical process. But, what Sluglett does leave us with is an indelible impression of the contingent nature of much of what occurred in Iraq, and it is this that keeps his a deeply human story, despite its focus on policy. 
In the end, Britain in Iraq at once corrects the old tale of the altruistic mandate and exposes the limits of the genre of high political history, the methodological impasse it could not bridge as anticolonial politics began to leave their mark on the writing of history. A painstaking focus on policy tends to obscure the operation of power itself. Unveiling it requires a sense of the larger political context--the historical process at work--and an understanding of the evolution of state practice. All this tends to raise the broader question, Why has the history of the British Middle East focused so closely on the realm of high politics? Some of this is certainly the 
> result of archival access and training. But, some of it is the product of the history itself: the hiving off of an exalted, elite realm of foreign policymaking in precisely the era that modern democracy came into its own and the Middle East became formally colonized by Europe.[1] In short, as the era of democratic nation-states came into its own, so too did a new style of imperialism that relied on the discreet diplomatic exchanges and collaboration of elites. To tell the history of twentieth-century empires as a history of high politics is to remain locked within that history; it is time to step out and observe the cultural, economic, political, and social scaffolding of the seemingly equally cynical machinations of the diplomatic stratosphere. 


Note 

[1]. For more on this, see my Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Partha Chatterjee has recently made a similar argument with respect to twentieth-century imperialism in general in Partha Chatterjee, "The Black Hole of Empire" (presidential lecture, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, November 7, 2007).


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## archade (Feb 27, 2008)

*David J. Silbey. A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine American War*, 1899-1902. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. 272 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, further reading bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8090-7187-6. 

Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Christopher McKnight Nichols, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia 

Three Conflicts: The Philippine-American War 

On the morning of September 28, 1901, Lt. Col. Eugenio Daza led a group 
of Philippine revolutionaries from their hiding places in a church inside an American army camp on the island of Samar. Armed mostly with bolos and machetes, the Filipino soldiers descended on a group of unsuspecting U.S. troops as they ate breakfast. "With the surprise, and at such close range, the insurgent disadvantage in weapons was neutralized, and bitter hand-to-hand combat broke out" (p. 191). U.S. forces were routed. Those that survived fled to the coast, climbing into small boats, and after several days at sea they made it to the nearest American outpost. Virtually every member of U.S. Infantry Company C had been wounded in the surprise attack, and forty-eight were killed, while approximately twenty-five to thirty Filipino soldiers died (p. 193). 

David Silbey chronicles the dramatic events of the war such as these through a driving, concise narrative in "A War of Frontier and Empire: 
The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902". The attack was one of the most sensational events of the conflict. For most Filipinos, it was a triumphant military victory. But for the American army, the events on Samar were best understood as a massacre, which represented their worst single defeat of the war. The American response was swift and terrible, underscoring the inherent military and moral hazards of this sort of conflict. Gen. Jacob Hurd Smith razed the town of Balangiga where the attack happened. He then reportedly issued the much-maligned direction to make the interior of Samar a "howling wilderness" in retribution. These events have tended to give rise to an interpretation of the war as evidence of America's racist, violent, and imperial motivations. Silbey is careful to show that while there is some truth behind such assessments, the Samar atrocities should not be construed as evidence that only the United States committed wrong. Rather, Silbey correctly notes that there was unconscionable violence on all sides. 
In recent years new studies of American empire and the conflict in the 
Philippines have flourished in part because of the pressing questions historians are asking about the U.S. role in the world. Noting the 
"urgency of the asking," from 1899 to 1902 and today David Silbey has produced a good, brief survey of what he terms "three separate and distinct conflicts" in the Philippines (pp. xi, xv). The question "What form was American entry into true global power to take?" lies at the heart of the way that Silbey adeptly surveys and synthesizes much of the work on the American-side of the conflict, including a limited but attentive effort to explore the Filipino perspective (p. xi). 

Silbey's book is an excellent introduction to the Philippine-American War that is primarily a military history and is best suited for students and for a popular audience. A War of Frontier and Empire is succinct, well written, and illustrated with maps and photos, although the maps could be more detailed and more plentiful to elucidate precise movements 
of people and armies. 

Silbey argues that the conflict itself represents a transitional moment 
in American thinking about frontier and empire. He asserts that the Philippine-American War must be understood as occurring in three distinct periods and in terms of three discrete conflicts. First, in 1898, was the brief-lived alliance between U.S. and Filipino forces that fought and defeated Spain (not a major focus for Silbey). Then, in 1899, immediately on the heels of victory over the Spanish, tensions rose and shortly thereafter a "second" war began. It was a conventional conflict between American and Filipino troops in the field, largely restricted to central Luzon and the area around Manila. However, within one year it became clear the United States was likely to win most conventional engagements so, rather than surrender, Philippine revolutionary leader 
Emilio Aguinaldo chose to engage in what Silbey argues was a "third" war. This was a guerrilla conflict (combined with a series of pacification campaigns) between U.S. and Filipino irregular forces that spread across the archipelago from roughly late 1899 through 1902. Silbey's thesis that there were "three conflicts" in the Philippines provides an excellent way to conceptualize and analyze the conflict (p.xv). It is also a great way to teach it and is just the sort of compact narrative that historians need to distill for lectures and for reading lists. 

A War of Frontier and Empire_ is structured both chronologically and thematically. The first two chapters examine the precursor ideas and actions of the conflict: the election of William McKinley to the presidency in 1896 and the rise of American imperialism. The main theater of the Spanish-American war was the Caribbean, of course, but once Commodore George Dewey maneuvered his American Asiatic Squadron out from harbor in China, the importance of Pacific naval operations greatly increased. Under Dewey's command the inexperienced fleet shocked the world by defeating the seasoned Spanish armada at Manila Bay in only six hours, sinking seven ships without losing a single American sailor. President McKinley was stunned and yet not certain if the United States should push for full control of the Philippine island of Luzon, let alone the whole archipelago. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo's revolutionary Filipino Army of Liberation consolidated their gains and conquered most of the island chain, forming an independent revolutionary government. As American troops disembarked their transport ships, Filipino revolutionary forces were about to capture Manila from the Spanish. The war against Spain ended quickly yet at the city's perimeter a dangerous standoff ensued between Americans and Filipinos. This situation dragged on for months until, on February 4, 1899, a minor nighttime skirmish spiraled out of control and "both side's forces were engaged in a chaotic fight in the darkness" (pp. 64-65). Thus began a second conventional war in which it quickly became clear that the Filipino insurrectos, having defeated the Spanish without virtually any help, 
were no match for U.S. troops. 

In Silbey's account, Aguinaldo comes off as increasingly weakened and naturally vacillating. Yet Silbey finds that he was perspicacious enough to see that for the revolution to continue it would require a major tactical transition. After a series of losing battles in October 1899, the conventional war was nearly over. Hotly pursued, Aguinaldo headed 
toward the mountains of Bayombong and made a heart-wrenchingdecision to "go guerilla" in December 1899. According to Silbey, the insurrectos "managed to reconstruct themselves organizationally and turn to an unconventional form of warfare that relied on ambush, concealment, and the avoidance of conventional set-piece battles" (p. 143). This new strategy prolonged the hostilities throughout 1900 and forced American troops, under the command of General Arthur MacArthur (Douglas's father), to fight a grim kind of jungle warfare in which enemies, neutrals, and allies were difficult to distinguish. Aguinaldo hoped that the sustained war would become unpopular enough to help elect William Jennings Bryan, and his an anti-imperialist bloc, which pledged to end the conflict. The resounding reelection of McKinley in November 1900 pushed Aguinaldo to despair and deeper into hiding. Within four months he was captured in a bold commando assault. While the fighting dragged on into 1902, "_n combination with the surrenders of other generals, [Aguinaldo's] capture seemed a disastrous capstone" to the revolution (p. 178). 

In his gripping narrative, Silbey shows the important role that race played in American descriptions of the war, particularly the depictions of the revolutionaries. He also highlights the struggles of African American soldiers as they grappled with the racism of their comrades. "The difficulties were profound for African-American soldiers; their duty was to fight against an enemy with whom they had some sympathy, and live among a people becoming victims of the same 'diabolical race hatred' that African-Americans experienced at home" (p. 111). These racial realities were so potent that Filipino propaganda stressed the hypocrisy of the U.S. Army and urged its "darker" troops to switch sides, with little success. 

Silbey concludes his book with a powerful argument that the war was pivotal for all the nations involved. It signaled the demise of the Spanish empire, "long past its days of glory" (p. 218). The conflict marked the "final war of a frontier ethos" that had driven Americans across their continent and represented "the first war of a global ethos" that would propel them across oceans (p. 218). For the Filipinos, the defeat "looked, in later decades, a lot like victory" because the three wars united the vast, disparate archipelago (p. 218). The islands "became, largely because of the shared experience of revolution, war, and insurgency, a self-conceived nation" (p. 218). In the end, Dewey's naval victory and the haphazard events of war led to an American intervention that lasted almost half a century. The United States did not grant the Philippines their independence until 1946. 

What A War of Frontier and Empire_ misses is common for any synthesis intended for a broad, non-specialist audience. There are a few conspicuous missed dates, such as the overthrow of Hawaii's Queen Lili'oukalani (which was in 1893, not 1883) (p. 17), and the misspellings of several names and places: for example, at various points Dagupan is termed "Pagupan," Sorsogon is rendered as "Sargosan," and Banaue becomes "Banane." In addition, a few generals and others receive incorrect names, such as Gen. Henry Lawton, misnamed "William" (p. 84) and Gen. Mariano Trias, called "Antonio" (p. 131). For a book surveying a complex topic requiring translation of Spanish, Tagalog, and other languages into English, these are not major problems.[1] 
The book provides a good, succinct summary and a fast-moving narrative. 
However, though well intentioned and well executed, A War of Frontier and Empire has one notable historiographical drawback. It does not quite recover from what is best characterized as the "usual problem" of America-centric historiography on the war in the Philippines. Silbey, like most historians well versed in this subject, himself notes his concern with the problem of United States-centered, primarily English-language scholarship on the subject. Historians since the 1980s have done much to move beyond America-centric narratives of the conflict in the Philippines. Postcolonial studies and the rise of the transnational frame have now become preferred models for such scholarship and have opened new and insightful vistas on this history. Yet this quandary remains stubbornly persistent in many studies of the larger encounter in the Philippines. Perhaps it is a problem without a clear solution because most of the local Philippines archives were destroyed during WWII. The remaining sources, chiefly those from the turn of the century and the period of American rule, are bureaucratic English-language documents, most of which are located in the National 
Archives (Washington, D.C.). Nevertheless, excellent new histories, such 
as Brian Linn's The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (2002) and PaulKramer's 

Blood of Empire(2006), have begun to rectify this problem. These and 
other recent histories shed new light on the relationships and intersections of race, empire, nations, and peoples at war and in peace in the Philippines. With so much on-going work in this vibrant field and on a transnational model, it is likely that the next wave of scholarship will continue to chip away at the age-old historiographical problem of America-centeredness.[2] 
It is impossible to read the current spate of scholarship on the Philippines and American empire without reference to the present. U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has again furnished a contemporary prism through which to view the complicated history of American expansionism and the challenges of the Philippine-American conflict. Silbey's A War of Frontier and Empire does not directly address these concerns but they are very much evident in his absorbing account. 
Reflecting on the history of America's "three wars" in the Philippines emphasizes the urgency of an enduring question: what is America's proper 
role in the world? 

Notes 

[1]. With special attention to multi-linguistic sources, Philippine nationalism, and the revolution, see Julian Go et al., eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999_ (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Augusto Espiritu, _Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Resil Mojares, The War against the Americans: 
Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906_ (Quezon City, 
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999). 
[2]. See Brian McAllister Linn, _The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and Linn, The Philippine 
War and the U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 
1899-1902_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Paul 
Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and 
the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Some representative recent works guiding new historiographical 
directions include: Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A 
Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues The 
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 

(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Mary Renda, Taking Haiti Taking 
Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See also Christopher Capozzola's review essay, "Empire as a Way of Life: Gender, Culture, and Power in New Histories of U.S. Imperialism," 
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 2 (2002): 
364-374._


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## archade (Feb 28, 2008)

*The Eye of Command*. By Kimberly Kagan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 241 pages. Reviewed by Dr. J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr., Professor of Military History, US Army War College. 

Kimberly Kagan has taken up dragon slaying. In a fascinating new and original book that relies heavily on literary interpretation, she proposes that John Keegan’s Face of Battle approach to narrating battles suffers fatal flaws. Kagan acknowledges that Keegan’s seminal work was a necessary palliative for the commander-centered battle narratives she calls general staff history—ones that approach battle as if commanders issue orders and armies obey those orders as unitary entities. Kagan works from the assumption that battle narratives must be historically accurate and precise, but also must explain the course and outcome of battles. She contends that by focusing on the thousands of individual experiences that comprise a battle Keegan and his disciples miss the forest for the trees and are unable to explain either the results of battle or why things happened the way they did. Face of Battle narratives provide excellent insight on the nature of battle, but their low-level focus actually obscures causality. 

Kagan combines elements of Clausewitz with complementary elements of chaos theory and applies the resulting intellectual construct to two ancient narrators to prove her point. From Clausewitz come the concepts of critical analysis and friction, among others. Clausewitz distinguished between a simple battle narrative and what he termed the critical approach. The critical approach was a three-step method involving gathering all the facts, tracing effects back to their causes (which Clausewitz called critical analysis), and evaluation to assign criticism or praise. Kagan focuses primarily on the second step of critical analysis. She argues that without that step, battle narrative is sterile and essentially useless since it cannot explain either results or causation. Friction arises at least partly from the actions of all the individuals that a Face of Battle narrative relates. The problem is that individuals, even those directly responsible for friction, rarely recognize their complicity. The commander, who has a different perspective in terms of both location and responsibility, is in a much better position to see, recognize, and comment on the causes and consequences of friction. In fact, Kagan asserts that one of a commander’s primary duties during a battle is to critically analyze (in the Clausewitzian sense) the action in order to try to recognize and respond to the innumerable unexpected events. This makes him an excellent narrator for people interested in causality. 

Chaos theory expands and enriches the idea of friction and addresses other important theoretical constructs like identifying and tracing causality. One does not have to be able to observe and catalogue every action in order to explain why things occurred. Important events with the potential for system-wide impact become noticeable at some point on their causal stream. It is the ability of the observer to see, understand, and interpret such events that leads to reliable interpretation of cause. 

Commanders are ideally suited for such observation, recognition, and interpretation. Thus, Kagan, who understands that battle is a complex and chaotic activity, contends that narration by telling all the stories of individual participants, if that were even possible, is inadequate. Further, attributing causation to soldier reaction to weapons or the general actions of combat arms is misleading at best. She proposes that the more reliable source for those interested in more than the nature of battle is the commander, whose account would supplement and include relevant description of events by individuals. 

The Eye of Command demonstrates its thesis primarily using Caesar’s narrations of battles from The Gallic War. Kagan includes an extensive analysis of Marcellinus Ammianus’s battle narratives as an ancient example of a pre-Keegan face of battle author, but the analysis supports her primary thesis only indirectly. Using Caesar, however, is significant since Keegan specifically denigrated Caesar’s narrations. Kagan examines several battles, although the most extensive and significant was the siege of Alesia. She analyzes Caesar’s reliability as a witness based on his own political agenda and natural tendency to protect his reputation, what he saw or could have seen or known during the fight, and how faithfully he related the action. She then evaluates whether Caesar’s narrative gives a reliable assessment of what transpired and why. In each case, Kagan finds much more reason to trust and accept Caesar’s narrative than did Keegan. 

Kagan and Keegan used the same text, so their difference is in interpretation, expectation, and belief—in a sense, different conclusions about half-empty or half-full. And in some respects, Kimberly Kagan has picked a fight that does not really exist. Even she admits that nobody—including Keegan—really narrates battles exclusively from the Face of Battle approach. It simply falls apart for all the reasons she has so correctly pointed out. She also admits that at some individual level, Face of Battle elements are necessary to any good story of battle. Kagan notes, for example, that Caesar included the stories of what he considered to be relevant individuals to set up or illustrate his narrative. So, what we have here is not dragon slaying but rather something more akin to dragon taming or perhaps selective dragon breeding. Kagan is dead on and absolutely correct about the defects of the Face of Battle approach to history; however, it retains a valid place in the literature. Kagan’s Eye of Command narrations are an intriguing alternative and certainly better at explaining causation than Keegan’s approach, but their literary contribution should be to supplement rather than completely replace Keegan’s technique.


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## archade (Feb 28, 2008)

Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military. By Erin Solaro. Emeryville, Calif.: Seal Press, 2006. 409 pages. Reviewed by Richard Halloran, onetime lieutenant of airborne infantry and a former military correspondent for The New York Times. 

When the volunteer force was struggling to stand up 30 years ago, it was confronted with three fundamental questions of personnel. Until then, the military services had been mostly white in their leadership, single in the young officer and enlisted ranks, and predominantly male. Now the services enlisted and retained a large number of black and other minority Americans, had to contend with young married officers and enlisted people, and brought in many young women. In sum, it might have been called the BMW revolution. 

Over the years, the armed forces have done perhaps the best job in America of integrating minorities into the mainstream of institutional life. In the mid-1980s, 

two master sergeants, one black, the other white, sat side by side in an office at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the field artillery. Asked about racial issues, one master sergeant (I don’t remember which one) said: “Man, we solved that problem a long time ago.” The other nodded in vigorous assent. 

Similarly, the services have added institutional programs to informal support systems that have long been operative to look after young families while members are deployed. Commanders know that individuals will not be effective on patrol in Iraq if they are worried about the family back home. Most commanders have bought into the adage that soldiers are enlisted but families are re-enlisted. 

Women, too, have made great progress in the military services since they arrived in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. But to Erin Solaro, an avowed feminist, military historian, and journalist embedded with combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan, that progress will not be complete until all restrictions on women serving in combat have been removed. “I believe we are at the end point of American women’s struggle for citizenship, a struggle that predates the Civil War and that is, in fact, almost as old as the Republic,” Solaro writes. “I think we are on the threshold of the only civilization that a free people should cherish: one that men and women create and defend together, as public and private equals.” 

She asserts that “final changes” must be achieved so that the participation of women in all phases of military service is “de jure as well as de facto.” The author writes that her experience in Iraq and Afghanistan “convinced me that women are now firmly part of the American military, in all its aspects, and that it’s time to drop all remaining combat exclusion policies and procedures as a matter of military necessity and of equality of obligation in citizenship.” About that particular war, Solaro declares: “From the outset I believed, and still believe, that we are fighting a war with militant Islamic fundamentalism, and that the outcome of such a war is important not just to American men, but also to American women. Therefore, logically, women should be part of the military, even if the opening campaign in Iraq has proven ill-advised and poorly executed.” 

The question of women in combat revolves around at least a half-dozen issues: 

• Men discriminating against women. Solaro spends more ink on this issue than any other. “A person who is categorically excluded from combat, whether a male ‘nondeployable’ or a woman, is a second class member of the most hierarchical organization in the United States,” she contends as she gathers arguments reaching back to the American Revolution to prove her point. 

• Physical ability. Solaro seeks to demolish this argument by contending that the difference between men and women “is predicated upon and aggravated by the military’s antiquated cultural assumptions about appropriate weights and body-fat levels for physically active women.” 

• Mental capacity. This contention for the most part has gone away as women have proven that they are capable of doing many military jobs. A chief master sergeant at Langley Air Force Base said that, given a choice between a man and a woman who seemed equally qualified to work on “black boxes,” he would choose the woman because she was more deft and patient for painstaking tasks. 

• Sexual tensions hindering unit cohesion. This is perhaps the most vehemently argued position of men who oppose assigning women to combat units. Solaro derides their arguments as looking “to the past instead of to a future defined by a civilian society ever more open to women’s potential and advancement.” 

• Chivalry. Solaro acknowledges this trait as “a binding moral obligation upon men to protect women” but contends that “it too often devalued women into weak and transient creatures.” A chief petty officer aboard a destroyer in San Diego said he would not hesitate to slam down a hatch on men below to save his ship. “But if I knew there were women down there, I don’t think I could do it.” 

• Primeval instinct. Solaro recognizes that “there is a deeply rooted, very powerful belief that women are not supposed to be risked in war because most women either have or will have children.” But she brushes that belief aside as the prattling of old men, statistics showing that “childbirth was more dangerous than military service, even in the infantry.” 

In the end, Solaro’s book is a valuable contribution to the running debate over women as warriors. She is fairly convincing in arguments about discrimination, physical ability, and mental capacity. She is less persuasive in her contentions on sexual tensions, chivalry, and the primeval instincts about the role of women in the preservation of the human race.


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## gearjunky (Feb 28, 2008)

Alright be honest who read all of that


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## Marauder06 (Feb 28, 2008)

I read the last article, that's about it.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

I didn't say that I know all those books. 
This is only a collect of various summuries in order to show various kind of books who are dealing with our main activity. 
visitor picks just what it wants to pick. 
I could be more accurate in the choice, that's true


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

The Morality of War. By Brian Orend. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 2006. 289 pages. 

Reviewed by Martin L. Cook, Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Department Head, United States Air Force Academy. 

In 1977, Michael Walzer published the first edition of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. That volume has now become the common touchstone for all thinkers in the Just War tradition and more than any other single thing is responsible for the proliferation and currency of the vocabulary of Just War in American discourse. Its arguments are the common frame around which other scholars range their positions—both in agreement and in disagreement—and has served to inform the world of policy as much as the world of scholarship. 

Brian Orend’s new volume, The Morality of War, promises to join Walzer’s in its widespread influence. Not since Walzer has there been a treatment of the whole range of issues in Just War as comprehensive and detailed in application to real-world circumstances. Indeed, Orend’s work exceeds Walzer’s in the range of topics treated and, even more importantly, updates the arguments to the many ways in which the world of international politics and use of military force have changed since the immediate aftermath of Vietnam. 

Building on his earlier excellent books on human rights, Just War, and Walzer, Orend sets himself the daunting task of providing a coherent and comprehensive position on the whole range of moral issues that arise in war and executes the task masterfully. 

He begins by providing a sweeping history of the Just War tradition and its bifurcation into its legal form (in international law) and its moral and religious form (in philosophy and theology). This chapter alone is a powerful antidote to the tendency in some military quarters to think that Just War is captured completely and adequately in the law of armed conflict. 

Orend then explores the complex questions of the moral reasons for the regard we pay to states in the international system and the concept of aggression as it applies to the rights of states to defend themselves against aggression. He very helpfully explores the application of these concepts both to intrastate war (the historically common form since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) and to attacks by non-state actors such as al Qaeda. 

A great strength of the book is that each theoretical discussion is then explicated as it bears on specific historical examples. Unlike Walzer’s use of history, which is often limited to very small vignettes to illustrate specific points, Orend develops these cases in richer detail so that the real complexities are allowed to play out. He explores fully the moral valence of the current international system with its deep tensions between sovereign states and the “on paper” legal authority of the United Nations Security Council over all uses of force not unambiguously in response to aggression, and applies that discussion to recent decisions to use force that failed to receive clear Security Council blessing. The result is a helpfully nuanced moral assessment of contemporary international organizations—judging them to be helpful and important, but acknowledging their very real limitations both in efficacy and legitimacy. 

The book devotes entire chapters to the modern contours of non-classical wars, a critical assessment of Walzer’s famous and much debated attempt to establish a moral category of “supreme emergency” which allows violation of the normal constraints of the war convention, and especially jus post bellum (the relatively undeveloped area of the moral requirements of justice in the aftermath of major combat operations—a topic to which Orend more than anyone else in the field has given especially helpful attention). Included in the post bellum discussion is a very thoughtful section on the history and probable future of war crimes trials which, of course, become daily more important as the International Criminal Court begins to function in earnest. Of obvious great relevance to the contemporary situation, there is also a chapter devoted to the moral and practical aspects of coercive regime change. 

The book concludes with thoughtful discussion of the two major competitors with Just War as a way of thinking through the moral issues involved in the use of military force. Pacifists, of course, reject the moral justification of the use of force entirely. But pacifism actually comes in numerous forms, based on different assumptions and convictions, and Orend provides an excellent typology of those alternatives. Realism, by contrast, rejects just war on the ground that moral thought is mere window-dressing in international relations. Instead, realists assert, international relations are (and should be, in the strong form of realism) the province of realpolitik. In their view, introduction of moral language and moral considerations is at best irrelevant—and at worst, dangerously idealistic. 

Orend’s discussion of these alternatives is balanced and careful. He finds much that is useful in each. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that Just War is, all things considered and with limitations which the alternatives make apparent, the most comprehensive and intellectually defensible approach to moral thought about war. 

In short, Orend’s book, in this reviewer’s opinion, provides the best single volume in English on Just War. Readers seeking a comprehensive and in-depth treatment of the whole range of thorny moral questions involved in war can find no better place to begin than with this book.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Strategy and History: Essays on Theory and Practice. By Colin S. Gray. New York: Routledge, 2006. 234 pages.

 Reviewed by Dr. Stephen J. Blank, Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. 

It is a capital idea to have all these essays published together for they contain much wisdom. Admittedly, this reviewer is an admirer of Dr. Gray’s work, but the importance of the ideas he addresses in this series of essays collected over 30 years should give much food for thought even to less impressed readers. The issues Gray addresses range from the nature of security or strategic studies, to the importance for strategists and analysts to learn from history, to ethics, and most important of all, to the overriding necessity of focusing on the strategic level of war. 

In all these cases, essays, and in his book titles the words strategy and history stand out as the lodestars of Gray’s thinking. Unfortunately, it is precisely these things and their attributes that are all too often missing from American strategy and policy. Indeed, we would do well to make this book or at least some of the essays required reading for policymakers and students and faculty at institutions of professional military education. Gray’s foundation has always been Clausewitz and his insistence that war is an instrument of policy which is chosen to achieve political, including strategic, ends or purposes. It is not merely a clash of arms as far too many Americans believe. Gray makes the acute distinction between warfare that is the tactical clash of two militaries and war that encompasses the multidimensional phenomenon of conflict between military or political entities. Throughout the book Gray finds that America has been deficient in understanding the need for a truly strategic approach, focusing instead on a methodology that glorifies technology and depreciates geography, culture, and history. 

In fact, throughout these essays as well as in his other books Gray consistently emphasizes the need to learn from history, how others may have resolved or confronted strategic challenges based on their geography, history, and enculturation. Sound strategy cannot omit these factors from consideration. If that omission does occur, and it features prominently in America’s military tradition, victory may be achieved, but it will not be strategic in nature. Indeed, strategy will have failed its ultimate test. We may win the battles only to lose the peace or broader war. 

Gray’s insistence on rigorously emphasizing the strategic dimension also leads him into controversy which he does not shirk. His essay “Nuclear Strategy: the Case for a Theory of Victory” from 1979 clearly states his insistence on the Clausewitzian dictum and the critical nature of strategy. The author makes it abundantly clear that if we were to enter into a nuclear war that war must be fought to achieve clear and tangible strategic objectives, i.e., it must result in victory. This insistence obviously flew in the face of those advocating deterrence theory and present-day political wisdom. Gray earned considerable opprobrium from those who insisted that there could be no victory in a nuclear war. Inasmuch as this was not necessarily the Soviet view at the time and the fact that Leninist theory was no less Clausewitzian in its insistence on the political objective of war, there is much to be said for this reasoning, unpalatable as it may seem. 

The essential point here is that wars are conducted for the purposes of securing political gains, as Liddell Hart famously said, “The purpose of war is a better peace.” Thus, a nuclear war may have to be fought, if it comes to that, in an effort to obtain a better peace. These essays reflect Gray’s independence of mind, intellectual rigor, and willingness to challenge the political correctness or conventional wisdom of the time. There is another key point for which Gray is well known and one that is related to this issue. Gray insists that the advent of the nuclear era in 1945 does not represent a break with the past, nor does it consign all the accumulated strategic wisdom and experience that has gone before into oblivion. Instead, the burden of proof rests upon those who espouse the belief that we entered into a wholly new world in August 1945. Again, the importance of strategy and history are championed at the expense of popularity and conventional thinking. But since these two elements, strategy and history, are precisely those in which Americans have been most deficient, the challenge falls to those who seek the answers regarding how we blundered into our current strategic predicament. Anyone responding to this strategic conundrum could do much worse than to start their effort by pondering the lessons Gray imparts in Strategy and History.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. By Joel Garreau. Rpt.; New York: Broadway, 2006. 400 pages.

 Reviewed by Dr. James R. Downey, Professor of Science and Technology, US Army War College. 

Technology is advancing at a dizzying pace. The cell phone you buy today is nearly out of date before you leave the store. Sequencing your personal DNA for under $1000 may be just around the corner. Nanoscale robots might some day be built and enter your brain providing significantly faster and more sophisticated human intelligence, blending the line between man and machine. Joel Garreau takes these kinds of developments and explores them to their potential extremes, both good and bad, in his book Radical Evolution. At first glance, the title might suggest some major modification to the evolutionary development of humans or the planet. In one sense this is true since the book explores the radical evolution of technology and how it might affect the future of mankind. To those less familiar with developments occurring in info-, bio-, and nanotechnology this book presents a useful overview. For the national security audience Garreau’s work provides an insight into the impact that twenty-first century technologies could have on the continuing Revolution in Military Affairs. 

The book opens by suggesting we are about to embark on dramatic changes previously not experienced by the human race. The chapter titled “Be All You Can Be” presents several accounts of research projects being conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the areas of biotechnology and human performance enhancement. Readers familiar with DARPA know it as the driving force behind stealth technology and the Internet. Today, DARPA is looking at how to make smarter, faster, and stronger soldiers as well as the enabling technologies that will make it all possible. Driving all the developments that Garreau describes in later sections of the book is something he calls “The Curve,” and an entire chapter is devoted to this subject. Garreau is not the first to describe the impact of exponential developments in technology, particularly computer processing capability. However, he does manage to do so in a way that will be accessible to a wide range of readers. The chapter identifies four areas of technological development many observers believe will be the key to a number of advances in this century. The primary driving force is the development of information technology (IT). Exponential advances in IT are enabling the other three technology areas the author highlights: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology. He collectively names these the GRIN technologies. Carried to their theoretical extreme the exponential advances in GRIN lead some to think we may approach the so-called technological “Singularity.” The idea, first suggested by Verner Vinge (interviewed extensively in the book), is that as the rate of change increases it reaches a point where change occurs essentially instantaneously and we simply don’t know what the world will be like after that. The GRIN technologies become the focus of succeeding chapters which explore potential futures described with thought-provoking titles including “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Prevail,” and “Transcend.” 

In the first future all the best possible things that could happen with the GRIN technologies combine to produce a world with greatly enhanced humans, reduced poverty, and increased prosperity for all. The main proponents of this view are Verner Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. In “Heaven” people can live forever, or at least a very long time, having tremendous mental and physical capabilities, and in the view of Kurzweil, may even transcend their biological existence. The “Hell” scenario which follows outlines what could go wrong in the future, particularly with nanotechnology. Here Garreau meets up with Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) and Francis Fukuyama (Our Posthuman Future), well known for their concerns about the future. The downsides of the GRIN technologies include global environmental disaster and the societal and ethical dilemmas resulting from fundamental changes to what it means to be human. Finally, both the “Prevail” and “Transcend” scenarios take a more middle ground suggesting that humanity will learn to deal with The Curve and our basic nature will allow us to survive the coming revolution. 

Probably the greatest strength of the book is the many interviews Garreau conducted with the leading proponents of the various scenarios. For readers who lack the time to read more in-depth accounts Radical Evolution presents the main arguments of individuals such as Vinge, Kurzweil, Joy, Fukuyama, Lanier, and others. Furthermore, this book introduces key issues and can spark some new thinking. At times Garreau interjects too much of his own opinion, even referring to classic environmentalist concerns like DDT. None of the technologies is explored in great depth, and the author bypasses some relevant topics like the future of energy. Most surprisingly to this reviewer, he essentially ignores the role that religion and faith will certainly play as some form of these futures plays out. Some readers may find that Garreau gives too many examples or repeats himself when describing a topic. This is particularly true in “The Curve” where most readers will get the point after just a few pages. 

This book provides a good introduction to the set of technologies most likely to profoundly impact the future of human society. Whether the world will end up in “Heaven,” “Hell,” or somewhere else altogether remains to be seen. Regardless, Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution provides an opportunity to learn about technological developments coming in this century and opens the door to ponder the implications for both national security and the future of the human race.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. By Richard H. Shultz, Jr., and Andrea J. Dew. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 328 pages.

Reviewed by Colonel Glenn Alexander Crowther, Research Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. 

Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew of the Fletcher School at Tufts University have produced an excellent primer on the nature of warfare and our likely enemies in the twenty-first century. 

Starting with the end of the Cold War, US investment in military capability has produced a military against whom no one can stand in conventional state-on-state warfare—so they won’t. Instead, the authors point out that we will face proud warriors who come from cultures that inspire them with centuries of martial tradition. 

The book opens with several chapters related to the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century and insight into the cultures that the United States may encounter as it seeks to stabilize the world as part of the Long War. The authors provide a well-thought-out view of the cultures in question, concentrating primarily on tribal societies. In three chapters that address “War After the Cold War,” “Assessing Enemies,” and “Tribes and Clans,” the authors posit that these tribal societies will comprise the enemies of the future for the United States. The nature of these societies have led to a preferred type of warfare—decentralized, violent, and family-based. When faced with an extremely potent conventional threat, these societies turn to the fundamentals they have always known: the ambush, the raid, and other techniques that western militaries associate with insurgency and asymmetric warfare. 

The book continues with four chapters devoted to discussion of recent theaters of conflict: Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Each chapter examines in-depth the society in question, analyzing the structure of family-based groups that comprise these organizations. Additionally, each chapter discusses the involvement of militaries from developed countries applicable to the particular case. These chapters provide details of what went wrong in a given scenario and why, emphasizing both the nature of the society in the country in question as well as the decisionmaking process exercised by outside forces. 

This lack of a centralized state that makes family-based societies viable in the twenty-first century is the same characteristic often found in weaker states that do not have the ability to provide good governance. This failing makes these locales attractive to transnational criminal and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. In such instances, the United States may engage the threat in an effort to impose stability. The target is never the local culture, but rather the lack of stability that US forces are seeking to address. The US presence in these areas inevitably comes into conflict with local power structures. Locals will almost always seek to drive away any foreign interlopers. The United States’ reliance on quick, kinetic solutions when faced with such attacks can lead to years of warfare. It is precisely the type of warfare that these family-based systems have specialized in for millennia. 

One theme concurrent throughout the book is the propensity for militaries and policymakers in developed countries to underestimate the warfighting capacity inherent in these tribal/clan based societies. The authors go into great detail regarding the mishaps suffered by the British, Russians, and United States in the four countries reviewed. They posit that in each case, success might have been possible if security specialists had taken certain precautions and adopted a more flexible approach. Shultz and Dew also provide recommendations for security specialists and policymakers to use in future conflicts in regions dominated by instability. 

Although the book does not necessarily plow new ground in terms of understanding different cultures, it does distill extant knowledge into a form readily understandable by today’s military professional. Although some aspects of the individual country studies are a bit detailed for the average reader, the overall effect is to provide insight into a world very different from our own. In addition, the authors are able to educate the practicing professional regarding what mistakes to avoid when operating in these environments. 

As with all of Shultz’s works, this book is thoroughly researched and impressively referenced. The authors provide insight to not only popular writings on culture such as Culture Matters by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, but also less well-known treatises such as Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald Horowitz and Ted Robert Gurr’s Minorities at Risk. Any serious student of culture will find a worthwhile framework for pursuing such studies in this work. But it is the professional warfighter who will profit most from the book. 

From soldiers on the ground to Combatant Commanders, to the Pentagon, and to politicians on Capitol Hill, everyone who specializes in international security matters on behalf of the United States should read this book. Additionally, the book describes the environment in which Army, Marine, and special operations forces will be operating for the foreseeable future. Sun Tzu implores us to know our enemy. Shultz and Dew have provided us with a superb roadmap to pursue that imperative. This book goes a long way in allowing the reader to get to know his opponent. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not ready the next time.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

The Army After Next: The First Postindustrial Army. By Thomas K. Adams. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006. 336 pages. 

Reviewed by Colonel Max G. Manwaring, USA Ret., Professor of National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. 

Only a few months ago, this book and its author probably would have been dismissed as just one more blast at the Bush Administration, perpetrated by a malcontent who “just didn’t understand.” But history has a way of changing things in rapid and unexpected ways. Now, it turns out that The Army After Next is “spot on” and Tom Adams is something of a prophet. As we reappraise the US Army in the light of the expanding irregular asymmetric war in Iraq, the escalating conflict in Afghanistan, and the 2006 congressional elections in the United States, even ardent supporters of military transition can see that something has gone awry. 

In this volume, Adams tells four stories. First, and most important, he presents a timely and well-reasoned explanation of the contradiction between transition, as it has been implemented, and experience encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan. As expected, the US military (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps) invaded Iraq quickly, and easily defeated Saddam Hussein’s army. But the conventional war unexpectedly turned into a grinding occupation, a multi-faceted insurgency, and something very close to civil war. The US military with all its firepower and technology could not control Iraqi territory or the population, and conventional state-on-state war was replaced by asymmetric warfare. In short, instead of providing a model for future war, the US military found that it was not trained, equipped, organized, or prepared for the kind of war we are fighting today and most likely will continue to face in the future. These “new” wars—whatever they are called—are insurgency-rooted, low-tech, and unconventional confrontations between the weak and the strong. There is no way a rational but weak competitor will confront a stronger opponent on his own terms. Rather, a wise competitor will shift away from conventional military confrontations, enlarge the proverbial playing field to include the whole of a society, and focus on non-traditional, inexpensive, and more political-psychological forms of war. 

Second, the author analyzes the debate over the belief that airpower can deal effectively, cheaply, and quickly with all kinds of enemies, and the counter-argument that an adequate and properly prepared ground force is necessary to exercise control over territory and people. That is, without control of territory and people, the results of airpower must be—at best—transient. The experience in Afghanistan is a case in point. Despite precision bombing, airpower was unable to dislodge and defeat the Taliban fighters. Even with the introduction of infantry and Special Forces into the equation, the small, low-tech, and highly motivated Taliban forces have been dislodged, but not defeated. As a consequence, it appears that the airpower vs. ground forces argument is moot. The point is that contemporary, asymmetric irregular conflict requires more than military solutions. Contemporary conflict is multi-dimensional and requires the coordinated application of all the instruments of national and international power. In these terms, the US civil-military effort in contemporary conflict has not applied the appropriate physical and intellectual tools necessary to deal with the reality of an existential alien, political-psychological, inter-religious, and inter-cultural conflict. 

Third, Adams carefully and logically leads the reader through the problem of trying to apply military transformation to an ill-defined future, while at the same time fighting a war that is quite different and real. The worst part of that issue is not the obvious difficulty of not knowing exactly where you are going or precisely how you are going to get there. The worst part of that conundrum is not that vast amounts of time, effort, and money are being spent trying to develop something that might prove to be really good against a conventional peer competitor in 30 to 50 years. The worst part is that men and women of the armed forces are right now risking their lives against wise asymmetric and unconventional competitors. They have been trained, equipped, and organized for something that remains ill-defined and technologically unfulfilled. Lacking the right training and equipment, they have attempted to “make-do,” while suffering and dying in the process. But for the advocates of transformation it is as if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not really happening, and that military demands of the real world do not matter. To the extent that reality is recognized and that the present force does matter, they are regarded as merely inconvenient aberrations. 

The last story is not really a story. Rather, it is the lessons that should have already been learned, but remain unheeded. These lessons will speak for themselves. What we have here is a well-documented, well-reasoned, and well-written piece of work by a highly experienced practitioner. This book should be mandatory reading for citizens as well as decision-, policy-, and opinion-makers. At base, The Army After Next deals with the issue of security—our security. Too few of us have paid much attention. Pay attention now.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Counterterrorism Strategies: Successes and Failures of Six Nations. Edited by Yonah Alexander. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006. 288 pages. 

Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, a US Army officer and a non-resident Fellow with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. 

The war on terrorism will have lasted six years by September 2007 and it has already lasted longer than the American Civil War and World War II. In fact, current US national security strategy considers it a Long War that may be protracted over the next several decades. Terrorism by non-state armed groups which are animated by radical interpretations of religion still represents a perfidious and present peril. Herein lies the relevance of a book that examines the history and evolution of counterterrorism across six cases, representing the efforts of six states. The aim of Counterterrorism Strategies is to glean best practices in order to arrive at some generalizations about the way ahead on national and international efforts to counter terrorism. For the United States, this framework is especially relevant because one of the 9/11 Commission findings was the imperative to formulate a long-term and balanced strategy to defeat terrorists, by compelling “the massive departments and agencies that prevailed in the twentieth century” to cooperate and “work together in new ways” to integrate and leverage all the instruments of national power. The editor, Yonah Alexander, is the director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington, D.C., as well as the director of the Potomac Institute’s Center for Terrorism Studies in Arlington, Va. The other authors are similarly qualified as contributors to this book, which in its essence, assesses how successful these six governments have been in adapting interagency and international approaches to counter non-state terrorist groups, particularly since September 2001. 

For a book with the announced purpose of gleaning best practices, the end is the best place to begin because it reveals the quality and the distillation of implications for policy. It is also the most germane part as it offers a way ahead to counter terrorism. The book prescribes policy fixes which are not necessarily epiphanous or timely, but are indeed correct and cogent. The first is that states must act multilaterally and unilaterally to develop credible capabilities to counter future terrorist threats. Second, the authors conclude that simple and ideal solutions to the threat of terrorism do not exist, and states must therefore develop organizational structures and institutional cultures that will enable them to adapt as quickly as, or quicker than, terrorists. The book’s third implication is exceedingly obvious, as it describes the critical elements of a counterterrorism strategy to be patience, perseverance, and relentless pursuit. Fourth, Counterterroism Strategies arrives at best practices that include the “apprehension or elimination of operatives and their leadership; disruption of infrastructure and sanctuaries; denial of material support and funding; and infliction of severe punishment on state sponsors and collaborators.” The poor integration of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies and policies also represents a trend that is in evidence throughout the book. One recommended remedy for this is to somehow close the gaps between domestic and international law. 

Counterterrorism Strategies also illumines a miscellany of realities and adaptations in the realm of counterterrorism that are relevant and interesting. Alliance Base is an adaptation that the book highlights as a paragon of cooperation, between French intelligence and the American CIA. Alliance Base is an international counterterrorism intelligence center that the two nations established in Paris during 2002. It has remained functioning and relevant, despite United States and French disagreements over Iraq. Also of interest are the sections that explain the German contributions to the post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts internationally, specifically their role in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2002, Germany contributed some special operations soldiers, along with air transport and maritime forces to support the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and patrol the seas near the Horn of Africa. Germany supported the International Security Assistance Force with a relatively substantial number of troops, manned Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and serves as the lead nation for the training and establishment of Afghan police. The German government also contributed 80 million euros a year beginning in 2002. Among America’s NATO allies, German contributions in Afghanistan were generally second only to Britain. Lastly, the chapter on Italian counterterrorism examines the challenges engendered in that country’s geographic position in the Mediterranean, which finds it in proximity to non-state terrorist groups from North Africa and as a land conduit between the Levant and the Middle East on the one side and northwestern Europe on the other. Non-state groups seek to exploit its favorable geography and its illicit networks of trafficking in humans, arms, and drugs. 

This book is a well-written and well-researched contribution to the ever-expanding corpus of books on counterterrorism. It is a relatively easy read. Also, a best practices approach to learning and adapting better than our adversaries is very helpful because it allows experts to harvest heterogeneity, which is preferable to the ossification that sometimes inheres in closed bureaucracies. This reviewer recommends this book as reading for military counterterrorism professionals, civilian counterterrorism experts, and students of national security. However, a preponderance of the prescriptions and policy implications provided at the end of the book have already been articulated in national security strategy and policy. While Counterterrorism Strategies does not present any significantly innovative policy recommendations, its case study approach offers valuable insight into the practices of other states’ intelligence bureaucracies. This insight may offer utility in adapting more innovative and internationally collaborative measures to better undermine and defeat our ever-mutating adversaries in this prolonged conflict.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. By Robert M. Cassidy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006. 211 pages. 

Reviewed by Associate Professor William Flavin, Director of Doctrine, Concepts, Education, and Training at the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, US Army War College. 

Robert Cassidy has expanded on his previous look into military cultures, Peacekeeping in the Abyss, by addressing the challenges of global insurgency. He provides the reader with the key historical studies, research papers, and policy initiatives that have shaped the United States and United Kingdom militaries’ approach to counterinsurgency and stability operations, many of which have not been previously collected in a single source. For example, he discusses the Kupperman Study done for the US Army in 1983, a work that established the conceptual framework for low-intensity conflict; and resulted in the 1985 Joint Low-Intensity Conflict Report that identified the major deficiencies in conducting such operations; and the 1966 Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam Study that laid out a governmental approach to counterinsurgency operations. He has also expanded his examination of comparative military approaches by including not only the American and British, but also the French and Russian. 

The first part of the book focuses on knowing the enemy. Knowing the enemy requires the study of the other forms of conflict. Often Americans have studied the writings of other cultures, such as Sun Tzu, to harvest ideas for incorporation into the “western way of war” but failed to examine what they say about the culture that created such thoughts. The author builds his case that al Qaeda is a global insurgency and that requires a global counterinsurgency. He examines the objectives and approaches that al Qaeda and various clones use and compares them with classic insurgencies. Cassidy comes to the conclusion that al Qaeda is best understood in the context of insurgency rather than the classic “terrorist” whose objectives are limited and as an organization is not interested in appealing to a larger population. 

What type of conflict is insurgency? Here the author discusses the problem with terminology and how it has clouded thinking. The author calls for greater clarity regarding such terms as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, low-intensity conflict, peace operations, irregular war, stability operations, and asymmetric warfare that have all been used and abused to describe the response to global threats. He proposes six “paradoxes of asymmetric conflict” as the path to greater understanding: strategic goals, strategic means, technology, will, tolerance of casualities, and military culture. If, for example, the greater power is not struggling for survival, is only using limited means, depends on conventional technology, is unable to generate domestic will, has limited tolerance for casualties, and embraces a “big war” conventional military culture, then victory over any insurgency will be difficult. 

Powerful nations can succeed only when they understand the nature of the conflict, comprehend themselves, and are capable of adjusting to meet varying challenges. 

Three chapters are devoted to understanding the American, British, and Russian military cultures and their strategy for defeating insurgents. Russia was judged as having the least flexible approach, with the United Kingdom having the most adaptable strategy, and the United States somewhere in the middle. All of these strategies were shaped by the particular nation’s geopolitical position, military culture, and accepted paradigm for war. With Russia being in the center of the continent it is naturally focused on land dominance, opting for structures to fight large wars, retaining an approach patterned after the glory of the great patriotic war (WW II). This strategy does not allow the required flexibility to successfully engage in such places as Afghanistan. The United Kingdom had a maritime focus and was focused primarily on a colonial policing strategy supported by the old regimental system, and curtailed by limited resources. Such an approach encouraged flexibility, permitting the British to succeed in a number of these endeavors. The United States also utilized a maritime approach, but equally embraced conventional war as a default strategy while continuing to conduct stability operations during the majority of its recent military history. 

Cassidy describes why the American military has opted for its default setting of large conventional wars waged quickly and decisively while relying heavily on technology. He bases this conclusion on his study of the writings of Russell Weigley, Samuel Huntington, and Carl Builder, the influence of Generals William T. Sherman and Emory Upton, along with his experience as a serving officer. This inclination to revert to this default position is reinforced by such experiences as WW II and the Gulf War, even though the Army has spent the majority of its recent history involved in stability operations. This is a contrapuntal voice that extends throughout history and is exemplified by the counterguerrilla operations in the Philippines, campaigns against the American Indians, stability operations in Viet Nam, and advisory efforts in El Salvador. This chapter discusses each of these operations and focuses the reader on oft forgotten historical events and individuals having relevance today. The chapter concludes by identifying 2003 as the turning point where the challenge of post-conflict Iraq is the catalyst for the rediscovery of counterinsurgency and stability doctrine and strategy. Is this a true change in the American military’s default position or simply a bump in the road? The book does not offer any predictions. So we are left to wonder when the United States retires from Iraq will that move mirror Viet Nam where all of the institutional learning and doctrine was washed away. 

How can you take this self-knowledge and exploit it to gain success? Here the book emphasizes that the majority of successful operations have employed indigenous forces. The bottom-line is that the local populace holds the answer to success. This chapter outlines innovative techniques such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Sections Administratives Specialisees in Algeria in the 1960s. Cassidy makes some excellent points, but what is not emphasized sufficiently in the political, social, and economic context is how will these newly trained indigenous security forces function after the United States leaves. 

In conclusion, this is a valuable book containing information that the professional soldier and administrator will find useful and should be a welcome addition to the professional officer’s library. The author arouses the reader’s interest related to global insurgencies. He then provides insight on a number of successes and failures in various attempts at countering regional insurgencies, but unfortunately leaves it to the reader’s own devises to pull all of this together in terms of a successful global counterinsurgency. We anxiously await his next work where he will hopefully describe how to execute a global counterinsurgency.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War. By H. L. Wesseling. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. 265 pages. 

Reviewed by Dr. Douglas V. Johnson II (LTC, USA Ret.), a research professor with the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. 

I am delighted anytime anyone writes about our principal allies in the First World War. Aside from Colonel Bob Doughty's work on the French army, a gaping void remains in Americans' understanding of the French before, during, and after this conflict. That said, this work is unlikely to be popularly acclaimed or widely read, even though it has a good deal to tell us about changing French attitudes toward war and the social and political position of the army within French society. It is unlikely to be popular because of a fairly heavy academic style and, ironically, because it deals with the French. That notwithstanding, there is value in slugging through this work precisely because the issues confronting the American military establishment today are somewhat similar to those addressed here. 

The loss of Alsace and Lorraine following the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War gave rise to a strong movement to recapture those areas, but the combination of the French army's miserable performance in that war and the passage of time gave fertile ground for pacifists to sow their contrary seeds. The result was a decline in respect for nationalism and consequently for the army within French society and the removal of nationalist teaching from the school system. This corruption of values caused alarm in other segments of French society and eventually engendered a reaction. The American parallel is a steady drumbeat of questioning the need for an army, an insidious movement toward a socialist pacifism that defines guns as inherently bad, and a growing view of the Army as reactionary. What is different in the case of the French is the degrees of change and reaction that took place. The concept of the army as the teacher of the nation, the keeper of essential values, was realized in major part through the return of nationalist teaching to the school system. Wesseling suggests that teaching stopped short of a militarism that dominated the political process, but it did lead to a militaristic attitude throughout the nation. 

There is, in this story, another possible but unlikely parallel. As the wheel of French public opinion turned, there was a concerted attack upon rationalism and science. Americans are traditionally gadget-minded if not scientifically inclined. We possess a faith in technology that if somewhat overblown at times is nonetheless partly responsible for our economic and other successes. What occurred in France was a strange turn toward a form of irrationalism. Students of military history know well the portrayals of the cult of the offensive and its high priest Colonel Grandmaison. Wesseling is careful to explain the realities of Grandmaison's work, but does acknowledge the emphasis on use of words like "spirit" and "will" that allow for some misinterpretation. 

Chapter 5, "The War: Image and Expectation," may well be worth the entire book as it offers a thorough review of who is writing what and what they are actually writing about war. It begins by noting that war was on the way to becoming an abstraction. While Europe enjoyed "peace" during the period 1870-1914, there was enough conflict in exotic distant lands to maintain a substantial level of hope for those wanting combat and enough to ensure a leaven of experience. The French successes in Africa and the Orient were enough to reawaken a positive interest in the army, although how much, Wesseling cautions, is not certain. 

Wesseling concludes that his study is admittedly narrow in focus and examines attitudes through literature only, further noting that it is often second-rate writers who actually capture the popular imagination. He notes as well that the national and military revival connected with a religious revival (to Catholicism) and constituted "a single complex whose deepest roots lie in the rejection of modern society and its underlying rational and scientific inspiration." His final lines are from de Tocqueville, who, in noting French dualism, called France "the most brilliant and most dangerous nation in Europe and the one best designed to become in turn an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference."


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

The Culture of Defense. By Christopher D. Van Aller. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001. 208 pages. Reviewed by Charles Moskos, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University. 

What should be the direction of our armed forces? And what should be done to move the armed forces in that direction? These are the questions Christopher Van Aller raises and persuasively answers. The core thesis of this elegantly written and reasoned book is that national leaders and citizens need to examine the political and sociological characteristics of armed forces before they embark on military change, whether in technology or people. The need, in the title of the book, is to grasp the culture of defense. 

The guiding principle in the analysis is the inherent friction between the military and civilian worlds. This friction is manifest, in somewhat oversimplified terms, in those who believe only high expenditures guarantee security and those who consider military programs basically as a waste of a society's wealth. But this friction can be complementary, Van Aller argues. Modern warfare, as well as operations other than war, requires the talents of both civilian and military worlds. The issue is the right ratio between the two spheres. 

If the military should resist most of the organizational practices common to civilian organizations (e.g. frequent personnel turnover), the armed forces need the periodical infusion of civilian energy and creativity (e.g. breaking out of old modes of warfighting). Inasmuch as war or its threat is a recurring condition, it behooves us to understand what sort of soldiers it takes to win wars. We also need to understand how to avoid having these soldiers become a threat to the civil society. Van Aller sees the United States entering the 21st century as a country founded on principles inimical to peacetime service and martial values. Yet, it is, at the same time, the preeminent military power with global commitments. 

Today as in much of America's military history, two key problems exist. One is the fascination with technology, to the detriment of understanding morale and initiative. This "technism" is particularly evident in the curriculum of the service academies. "West Point and Annapolis still emphasize mathematics and technology to the detriment of history and strategy." In a very provocative point, Van Aller states that American security planners ought to consider, though not necessarily adopt, less costly weapon systems rather than always planning for changes of greater technological complexity. 

The other recurring problem is the avoidance of military service by privileged youth during peacetime and combat duty during wars. This in turn disconnects the armed forces from civilian elites, a state of affairs Van Aller sees as an increasing gap in the post-Cold War era. In fact, the overemphasis on weapon technology in defense planning leads to an avoidance of dealing with more decisive issues, such as who should serve. 

Van Aller casts a wide historical and philosophical net, invoking the insights of Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He adapts the theories of these political theorists to lay the groundwork for an updated notion of citizenship obligation and civil-military relations. Among modern theorists, the author frequently cites Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Edward Luttwak, and Martin van Creveld (whose name unfortunately is misspelled in the text). A reference to some of the contemporary iconoclasts such as Ralph Peters or Charles Dunlap could have strengthened Van Aller's presentation. 

Van Aller makes a highly original argument that the initial phases of most major American military conflicts are usually hamstrung by the existing military professional leadership, but rescued by outside civilian direction. He convincingly argues that such changes rarely come from within the military establishment itself. One example is how civilian leadership implemented the convoy system over the resistance of the naval leadership in both world wars. 

Now more than ever, it is necessary to redesign forces for the threats of the contemporary post-Cold War period. Since the Cold War ended a decade ago, the Pentagon has built its force structure around the notion that the United States must be able to fight and win two major regional wars almost simultaneously to meet its global national security obligations. That the Defense Department review concluded by Secretary Rumsfeld has now recommended that the two-war scenario be scrapped in favor of a more complex approach buttresses Van Aller's thesis. Noteworthy, this significant change in security premises was a key recommendation of the early 2001 report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. 

Van Aller makes a strong case for the contemporary relevance of the citizen-soldier concept. He would like to see a reinvigoration of the citizen-soldier, coupled with a solid professional officer corps. He argues for serious consideration of a compulsory form of national service for American youth, including civilian as well as military service. (Full disclosure: your reviewer is cited heavily in this regard.) 

The Culture of Defense raises important and troubling questions. Van Aller's answers are persuasive as he attempts to reconcile notions of citizenship obligation with the realities of the post-Cold War era. The author performs an important service in casting a skeptical light on the traditional military profession and its unbridled faith in technology. The publication of this book is exceptionally well-timed.


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## archade (Mar 1, 2008)

*A Soldier's Duty*. By Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Random House, 2001. 320 pages. 

Reviewed by Professor Martin L. Cook, Elihu Root Professor of Military Studies and Professor of Ethics, US Army War College. 

Much has been said and written in recent years about the state of civil-military relations and subordination of the US military to civilian leadership. Certainly the tension between the values of the officer corps and the civilian leadership has, in recent years, been marked and great. Contributing significantly to that discussion was Thomas Ricks' earlier nonfiction work, Making the Corps, and his many well-informed articles on military affairs in The Wall Street Journal and, in more recent years, The Washington Post. 

In this novel, the author takes full advantage of the liberties fiction allows to explore the attitudes of some Army officers in particular on this subject. The novel's premise is that the President orders a deployment of ill-prepared forces on a humanitarian mission against the weight of professional military advice. Email begins to fly from untraceable addresses criticizing the deployment and, increasingly, advocating public expressions of dissent by uniformed officers, culminating in direct action to sabotage the deployment itself. 

A thoroughly engaging mystery story unfolds as investigations are undertaken to determine the source of the emails and sabotage. The details of the plot would, of course, ruin the mystery for the reader. But the narrative vehicle gives Mr. Ricks ample opportunity to introduce extensive dialog among his characters on questions of the nature and scope of "a soldier's duty"--to the Constitution, to elected political leaders engaged in (from the military perspective) ill-advised action, to military superiors and subordinates, and finally to the Army. The author claims that much of this dialog is not his own creation, but plucked verbatim from emails he has received or had forwarded to him from serving officers. Indeed, they have the ring of reality. 

The novel is effective as fiction, but it aims at more than engaging pastime reading. Mr. Ricks' real purpose is to raise pointedly the questions of ethical obligation and professionalism of an officer corps frustrated with taskings it often questions, if not outright rejects. Without the defining threat of the Cold War, the author perceives a military separated from and, to some degree, alienated from the American society it is pledged to serve. Mr. Ricks illustrates effectively the human tensions of obedient service to civilian leaders whose judgment some officers distrust, when those leaders send them on missions whose purposes are murky, in an atmosphere of casualty aversion and political management of the military aspects of the deployment. 

The author's portrayal of senior Army officers is in many respects unflattering and, in the case of one officer and his subordinates, literally criminal. But he also shows good officers struggling with the ambiguities of strategic-level leadership, trying to triangulate their way through the complex pressures of supporting administration policies which, in private, they have opposed. He shows the challenges to their integrity in keeping their pledges to give their honest personal opinions to Congress when required, and yet not appearing to lobby for policies opposed to the President's. All of that, of course, is framed in light of their passion to protect and defend their service, and their pain in placing soldiers on deployments where their worst fears come true and ill-trained troops take casualties on missions they opposed in the first place. 

A Soldier's Duty is bound to be a controversial and challenging read for any thoughtful military officer. One might well dissent from the picture painted of the state of civil-military relations as too bleak, too polarized. But one would have to look far for a novel that touches so deftly on the complexities and challenges of leadership of military organizations at the highest levels. However one reacts to the choices of these particular characters, reflection on the environment in which they strive to serve the nation, the Army, and their soldiers is a vitally important intellectual exercise. I know of no other work of fiction that forces the complexity of those questions so clearly on the reader.


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## archade (Mar 8, 2008)

Thomas Bender. A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. xii + 368 pp. Bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-8090-7235-4.

Reviewed for H-Amstdy by James Gilbert, Department of History, University of Maryland

Context Matters

Thomas Bender, an accomplished and versatile historian at New York University, has undertaken a synthetic narrative of American history from a global perspective. By some measures, this might seem an impossible or contradictory task because it entails dissolving the solitary, progressive, and self-aggrandizing story of discovery,settlement, nation building, and international hegemony in favor of an
international point of view from which the nation itself seems less in focus than the interplay of larger forces shaping development, economic change, competition among empires, and so on. Unlike modernization theory with its depiction of inevitability and a more or less singular model of success, this bird's-eye view of the nation links it to larger developments and thus forces frequent comparisons. Building a narrative out of the process of interchange and broad-scale trends is a difficult task. The point--and I think it is Bender's central one--is that national history is not lost in the process so much as it appears very different. To sacrifice the ultimate centrality of the national narrative in the modern world would, in a curious sense, diminish what is really new in this account.

Bender's strategy is to segment U.S. history into five broad sections, discussed within a general chronological framework. These sections depict (in my own words) 1) beginnings, 2) the American Revolution, 3) concepts of freedom, 4) the self-denying American Empire, and 5) social freedom and the welfare state. Within these rubrics, Bender describes ways in which the United States is part of a shifting constellation of nations and regions, which interact to form new shapes and meanings. Indeed, what is most striking in this work is the ability of the author to discover the very broad connections among all of these subjects between what occurs in the United States and elsewhere. And the elsewhere is not just confined to Western Europe (England, Germany, and France), even if these nations loom particularly large in our history.

One of the two most successful chapters (although the others are also quite good) discusses the problem of freedom and slavery in the United States. Bender is quite right to see anti-slavery as an international development and convincing in his discussion, for example, of the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the century that eventually liberated slaves. Beyond this, I was particularly struck by his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln, not just as an emancipator, but also as a subtle and thoughtful proponent of liberal nationalism and a major influence on European thinkers. Placed within the continuum of antislavery movements worldwide, the United States looks both different from but similar to other nations engaged in breaking the shackles of bondage. Perhaps we have heretofore thought so much about slavery as a uniquely American dilemma that we have lost sight of its ubiquity in the world as well as the general movement of abolition in which the nation participated.

The other chapter that most clearly demonstrates the importance of an international perspective describes the evolution of the American empire. In some respects, this revision follows the lead of historian William Appleman Williams who developed the notion of an American informal empire, growing out of nineteenth-century "Manifest Destiny," aggressive protection of free trade and open markets, and finally, into direct confrontation with the old empires of Europe in the twentieth century.[1] Bender's view is slightly different, emphasizing the very long history of American engagement with European Empires—the successful American Revolution was, after all, partly a consequence of the enmity of France and Britain. As Bender concludes: the "American way of empire was even presented as anti-imperialism because it guaranteed openness, in contrast to the exclusivity of the old empires" (p. 233). This statement is an important argument because it links the visionary perspectives of Thomas Jefferson, for example, to the much later engagement of the United States with European colonial empires. It also illustrates an essential point, which is the moral center of the work. It is Bender's contention that "American Exceptionalism," the notion that the peculiar circumstances of American history exempted the United States from many of the struggles and brutalities of Europe, is not only a misjudgment, but that, in a curious way, any inward-looking national narrative almost inevitably reproduces this exceptionalist story. This is not to deny difference, but rather to contextualize it within a larger framework to see connections and similarities as well as the simultaneous engagement of ideas and the play of related forces. As a thoughtful summation of research in areas like the transatlantic exchange of social welfare reform ideas, the African Diaspora, European expansion, and comparative studies of empire, this is a fine, even innovative work.

While it touches on many subjects, it remains a suggestive, rather than a comprehensive work. Bender might, for example, have chosen to emphasize questions of women's equality. Or he might have concentrated on science and technology, or perhaps, ecology. Given the cyclical predominance of first liberal and then conservative notions of the state, he might have emphasized the latter. Finally, it seems to me that a chapter on religions, their interactions with state and society, would be a very important story to follow. This list, which can certainly be extended, suggests the real limitations, or rather, the enormity of the task of rethinking American history from an international perspective. Bender has accomplished a great deal. He is convincing in his argument that the United States is not unique, but just different in the way that other nations also differ from each other. This is, however, much more than a shift in nuance. It makes all the difference in the world to see the United States as a nation among nations.

Note

[1]. William Appleman Williams, _The Tragedy of American Diplomacy_, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972).


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## archade (Mar 23, 2008)

Don't Kill the Messenger: Vietnam War Reporting in Context
HENRY G. GOLE
© 1996 Henry G. Gole

What follows is a soldier's appreciation of how journalism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, and how the craft affected attitudes of professional soldiers about the media. It is specifically directed at media critics, particularly the veteran of combat in Vietnam who is prepared say: "OK, it's been a long time. Show me that the media wasn't and isn't a pack of lyin', flag-hatin', pinko SOBs." It is written by an old sweat who, despite his aversion to the worst aspects of journalism--back-fence gossip and hyperbole posing as protection of our first amendment rights--recognizes the need for an independent media, even an imperfect media. Somebody has to watch the guys with the weapons, those with fingers in the till, and those who make rules for the rest of us. Even a flawed tool is necessary to perform those vital functions. This essay offers observations about published reflections by journalists who have something interesting to say about the craft and about Vietnam reporting, and an insight into the attitudes of Army War College students of the 1980s regarding the reporting of the American war in Vietnam.

Journalists on the War

It might have helped, but probably not much, had soldiers appreciated the hypercritical predisposition journalists bring to their observations of the universe, including their own craft. They are quick to praise and to damn. Morley Safer, in one paragraph of his Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam (1990), calls his employers "the comintern that ran CBS" and praises colleague Charles Collingwood as one of Murrow's Boys: "He was a scholar when broadcasting no longer wanted one, amused more than appalled by the contract-crazed chorus girls and boys who've taken over the podium."

Safer's admiration of Collingwood might be dismissed as a lamentation for the passing of the good old days by one himself growing long in the tooth, but he is not alone in recognizing that Vietnam was the first television war. "First television war" rolls off the tongue too easily today, reflecting the sophistication of viewers who have had wars and peace operations with their evening cocktails for more than a quarter century. It is hard to recall how profoundly--as well as how quickly--the new medium affected both its subjects and the journalism it produced. At one point in Dispatches (1977)--the hip, psychedelic, surrealistic reporting of the war that is the next-best thing to having been there--Michael Herr cites a comment by a Marine in a skirmish line assaulting a dike from a rice paddy in (almost) these words: "I don't like this flick at all."

The American public saw scenes from a war on TV. It also saw its soldier-actors seeing themselves in scenes from a war on TV. Some soldiers saw promotions, or fame, or both. In The Camera Never Blinks (1977), Dan Rather describes a Colonel whose "eyes lit up like the jackpot on a pinball machine. He said with a kind of gasp, `Television!'" when he spotted Rather and his cameraman. "He liked reporters and he knew the value of a tough reputation." The Colonel, a regimental commander, seemed fully prepared to stage a shoot'em-up, showing his brave troops zapping bad guys, the combat analog of "leaking." Whenever a media representative reports a close-hold government policy that some noble soldier, appointee, or civil servant has leaked, no doubt for some enlightened reason, censure of the reporter is not unusual. Isn't it remotely possible that the leaker had a dog in the fight?

Unfortunately the actual combat film obtained at risk of life and limb by brave or crazy photojournalists, while authentic, often distorts and misleads. Tim Page's Page After Page (1989) suggests that he might fall into that latter group of journalists; Frenchman Alex Bauer, on the other hand, who was both brave and combat-smart, is credited by Dan Rather with keeping them both alive despite hairy adventures in the bush. According to Peter Braestrup's Big Story (abridged edition, 1978), which offers a comprehensive account of the press coverage and an objective interpretation of the 1968 Tet offensive, what usually got on the air was "US GIs in combat." That's what "New York" wanted. Little reporting was done on the ARVN, so "the general cumulative impression given was that it was an American war." Braestrup adds that the function of the TV network correspondents in Vietnam--and around the world--differed radically from that of their colleagues in the print media. He demonstrates that while it is true that the camera doesn't blink and action footage was the hot stuff desired by the three networks, what generally happened was that 48-hour-old footage was married to a few sentences stitched together in New York by a busy network editor whose text was in fact the latest AP and UPI dispatches from Saigon. The "nightly news" was a cut-and-paste job of two-day old film and new stuff from the wire services that did not really wrap up that day's news. Avuncular Walter Cronkite's authoritative sign-off, "And that's the way it is," wasn't quite the way it was.

Braestrup, a veteran journalist (Time, The New York Times) and chief of The Washington Post's Saigon bureau during Tet, concludes that the network approach was not to produce news in the sense of fact-finding and interviewing. The film vignettes were used in one-to-two-minute "snippets" (his word) with commentary that, given the TV format, purported to be representative, typical, or a microcosm. In fact, what the cameraman got was a dramatic part of some larger situation that the network producer sandwiched into a tight 24-minute program. Out of context, there was no way to know if what viewers saw was in fact unique or typical. Braestrup opines that the process produced material more personal and conclusive than anything permitted newspapermen or wire-service reporters.

An appreciation of what makes a big-time journalist tick and how a successful media career is made can be gained from a few books written with flair, charm, and insight by three well-known media professionals, two of them print journalists, one a TV reporter who subsequently became a celebrity network anchorman. Russell Baker of The New York Times provides a warm and likable account of his journey from blue collar newsboy in Baltimore to bureau chief in London, to White House correspondent, to Times columnist in two engaging books: Growing Up (1982) and The Good Times (1989). Ben Bradlee's A Good Life (1995), a witty, honest, and crisply written autobiography, takes the reader with Bradlee from prep school, Boston, and Harvard to World War II service as a junior officer on a destroyer in the Pacific and ultimately to the top of the journalistic heap as managing editor, from 1966 to 1991, of The Washington Post. His part in the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, in the Watergate affair, and in other big stories puts the reader in the shoes of a newspaperman conscious that he is writing "the first draft of history." Rounding out the short list is Rather's The Camera Never Blinks because of the sense of the subtitle, Adventures of a TV Journalist, and because it is an honest book. Rather, younger than Baker and Bradlee, grew up with TV and brings a perspective flavored by modest Texas roots, an undistinguished college, and local TV station experience before making it to the big time in The Big Apple and eventually ascending to the throne vacated by Walter Cronkite.

Turn now to another short list: Vietnam books by journalists who offended a generation of American soldiers. Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, and Peter Arnett brought unambiguously bad news to their readers early in the American war in Vietnam, even before the commitment of large American formations to the war. Their message had in common a variety of themes:

    * Political leadership in Hanoi promised sacrifice, unification, and the ejection of the imperialists, while Saigon promised corruption, palace coups, and endless muddle.
    * North Vietnamese army troops and Viet Cong auxiliaries were skilled and prepared to die for their cause, while the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was inept, unwilling, and unlikely to improve.
    * Neither the American Embassy nor top US military leadership in Saigon had a clue about the war in the boondocks (because they did not get out of Saigon), while competent US advisers in the boondocks had to bribe reluctant Vietnamese officers to conduct operations with poorly motivated and poorly trained troops.
    * The enemy's willingness to endure the uncongenial physical and psychological environment of close combat contrasted sharply with a wish--by Saigon and American senior advisers--for a deus ex machina: helicopters, armored personnel carriers, people sniffers, electronic gadgets.

In brief, energetic young journalists went on combat operations with the advisers they admired, made their observations, and then heard accounts of those operations from Saigon warriors whose information had been sanitized to make good news of bad news as it was passed up the chain of command. Halberstam, fresh from combat reporting in the Congo, noted the acrimonious relationship between the press and the military immediately upon his arrival in Vietnam in 1962. The message that the war was being lost did not endear the callow messengers to the responsible graybeards running the war from Saigon and Washington.

The 1963 battle at Ap Bac at once illustrates and characterizes the chasm separating the press and military, one that was not bridged in the course of the war, and that would eventually find almost all soldiers on one side and the media on the other in confrontational stances. Neil Sheehan, in A Bright Shining Lie (1988), calls the battle of Ap Bac a "climactic humiliation of the Saigon side." David Halberstam, in The Making of a Quagmire (1964), emphasizes in describing the battle that despite superior numbers and firepower, a combination of tactical and helicopter air support, and the mobility afforded by the M-113 armored personnel carriers, a demoralized ARVN lacked leadership and the will to fight while the enemy demonstrated determination, skill, and great courage. In Live from the Battlefield (1994) Peter Arnett says of the Battle at Ap Bac that it was the biggest story he had covered in his then-six months in Vietnam because "It convinced the Saigon press corps that either the authorities were unaware of the full dimensions of the insurgency, or the discrepancies were being concealed from us." The Americans got the set-piece battle they had always wanted with an elusive foe. That foe performed much better than expected, ARVN was a disgrace, and official America in Saigon reported success.

Another event--a series of events, really--only added to the growing discord between soldiers and the media. Analysts generally regard the Tet offensive of 1968 as an operational failure for the Viet Cong and the NVA--even a disaster--because the Viet Cong infrastructure, so long in the making, was destroyed in the fighting. But the same analysts saw the event as a strategic success for the enemy. Their seeming omnipresence--South Vietnam lit up like a pinball machine, and the enemy was in the American Embassy--caused America to lose its stomach for the war. America's professional soldiers blamed the media for stressing the enemy's Tet successes while overlooking the loss of infrastructure that had taken generations to build. Ergo, bad media, true to form, undermined the noble efforts of American soldiers and Marines.

But Peter Braestrup's erudite Big Story, dedicated to the memory of 43 named foreign journalists who died in Indochina in 1961-75, blames President Johnson and General Westmoreland for the Tet debacle. He asserts that Johnson and Westmoreland knew from intelligence sources throughout South Vietnam that the enemy planned a big show, but for reasons still unclear, they failed to prepare the American people for what was about to happen. One assumes they were confident. Happy news was reported, and unhappy news was suppressed. The American public had every reason to believe that all was going well in 1968 when the bottom seemed to fall out. Both the press and the American people were shocked at the intensity and duration of enemy activity. Before Tet there had been a sense that the tide had turned, that America was on a course to victory. After Tet there was a general sense that the best course of action was to get out. Leadership, not the media, had failed to prepare the nation.

Attitudes of Army War College Students in the 1980s

As one who had served tours in Vietnam in elite units in the salad days of 1966 and in the generally unhappy days of 1970-71, your current writer closely observed Army War College students of 1980-84 and 1986-88 as a faculty member. Those students knew that they were the first generation of American officers to lose a war. The lost war produced a profound demoralization within their ranks--a demoralization that was generally unappreciated by the public. A Chief of Staff of the Army even declared that our Army was "hollow." Among themselves the officers lashed out with uncharacteristic passion at everything external to the brotherhood.

These officers were typically 42-year-old lieutenant colonels or newly minted colonels, still in competition for stars; they had at least 20 years in uniform, and had served in Vietnam once or twice as junior officers in the 1960s and early '70s. And they were angry. They almost unanimously despised journalists and made no effort to conceal their attitude. Those students held Congress and civilian leadership in low regard and resented the apathy and ignorance of the American public about national security and matters martial. But they reserved a special venomous attitude for "the media," a term more sneered than spoken.

Despite efforts of commandants and faculty to inform class after class of the proper role of the media as a safeguard against tyranny, the need for an informed electorate in a democracy, the high standards of the best journalists, and the competitive culture of the craft, successive classes remained adamant in their aversion to journalists. In 1988 a distinguished journalist for a prestigious newspaper privately observed that he was fed up. After fighting the good fight by regularly participating in the annual "media days" that brought the craft's best practitioners to Carlisle Barracks for discussions with the students, he suspected that a generation of soldiers would go to their graves hating all journalists for the Vietnam reporting of some. He was right. Some 20 years after their experience in Vietnam, student attitudes toward the media were overwhelmingly negative and seemingly permanent, at least in that generation of embittered officers.

Conclusions

Perhaps the war in Vietnam attracted a wider range of journalistic talent than had earlier wars. It has been alleged that the price of an airline ticket to Vietnam allowed adventurers lacking training, experience, maturity, and judgment to catch on with the Saigon press corps as go-fers, stringers, or freelance photographers. Some later even got bylines. But a similar lament was heard among professional soldiers about the range of talent in the US Army. It has been suggested that Lieutenant Calley of My Lai infamy was commissioned because the Army had to dip to the bottom of the barrel. Few Ivy Leaguers were storming the recruiter's office, and repeated tours in Vietnam exhausted the supply of junior leaders, especially infantry officers and NCOs and helicopter pilots. OCS churned out second lieutenants; "shake and bake" leadership courses produced instant sergeants without the benefit of the traditional five to 15 years of experience with troops; and young men in their late 'teens and early 20s, whose older brothers in the 1950s had buzzed around the town square in hot rods, found themselves piloting helicopters over the jungles of Vietnam. While huffing and puffing about those who ducked military service during that war, old soldiers will recall that many a career NCO extended his tour in Vietnam to get out of a rifle company and into some rear area job. Some gung-ho officers of the peacetime Army bailed out when it became obvious that regulars would serve repeated tours in Vietnam. Talent, courage, and a deep sense of professionalism were unevenly distributed in both the media and the military during the war in Vietnam.

TV can be charged with some distortion of events as it went through growing pains while reporting war in a new medium, but did the United States need TV to make a mess of it at the policy, operational, and tactical levels? At the policy level we conducted a limited war while the foe, apparently prepared to fight to the last man, engaged in total war; at the operational level, "search and destroy" became the equivalent of mosquito-hunting with a sledge hammer; at the tactical level we sent amateurs to fight pros because our military personnel system supported the war with peacetime habits. Apprentice US privates had to learn their trade the hard way, as we sent bush-wise journeymen home at the end of a year, just when they had learned their deadly business. (S. L. A. Marshall, in The River and the Gauntlet [1953], offers the same lesson from the war in Korea.) And the criteria by which the military personnel system assigned commanders in Vietnam did not include: "This officer has demonstrated great skill at effectively commanding in combat at this level, and he is very good at accomplishing missions while keeping his soldiers alive."

The Department of Defense and our Army have come to grips with media-military relations by adopting a policy of openness limited only by operational security and individual rights to privacy. Journalists now can get the story out by the technical means available to them; they can get to all but the most remote corners of the earth unaided; they will be on the scene in ever-increasing numbers, sometimes before our deploying troops arrive, and censorship will not be the US policy toward the media. Media representatives have participated in training for peace operations, and journalists destined for Bosnia had the opportunity to prepare themselves for mines, cold weather, and survival skills by training alongside US troops in Germany and subsequently deploying with them. One suspects that a reporter enduring a cold wind in his face while standing ankle-deep in mud rapidly becoming ice could be kindly disposed--perhaps to the point of admiration--toward blue-fingered engineers slopping in a river day and night to assemble a bridge. Openness characterizes the media policy of the 1990s.

Is it not, at last, time for the true believers of the 1960s to admit that the media generally had it right about Vietnam, and that we crew-cut, spit-shined, flag-lovin', professional soldiers were on a fool's errand?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnett, Peter. _Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Baker, Russell. _Growing Up_. New York: Congdon & Weed, dist. by St. Martin's Press, 1982.

________. The Good Times. New York: Morrow, 1989.

Bradlee, Benjamin. _A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Braestrup, Peter. _Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington_. Abridged ed.; Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1978.

Halberstam, David. _The Making of a Quagmire_. New York: Random House, 1965.

Herr, Michael. _Dispatches_. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Page, Tim. Page After Page. New York: Athenaeum, 1989.

Rather, Dan, with Mickey Herskowitz. _The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist_. New York: W. Morrow, 1977.

Safer, Morley. _Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam_. New York: Random House, 1990.

Sheehan, Neil. _A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam_. New York: Random House, 1988.

*The Reviewer*: Colonel Henry G. Gole, USA Ret., served two tours in Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group, one of them with MACVSOG, and was an enlisted infantry soldier in Korea during the Korean War. He later taught at the US Military Academy and the US Army War College. He is a graduate of Hofstra University; holds master's degrees from Hofstra, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Stanford University; and earned a Ph.D. at Temple University.


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## archade (Mar 23, 2008)

U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1942-1976. By Andrew J. Birtle. Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 2006. 570 pages.

 Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, a US Army officer and a non-resident Fellow with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

To be certain, U.S. Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1942-1976 is a relevant addition to the corpus of books on counterinsurgency operations and doctrine. Examining the quarter century that covers the American involvement in Vietnam, this book is also unique in that it is the only book I know of that focuses exclusively on the topic of doctrine development, training, and professional military education during this key, but sometimes forgotten, period. The timing of this book is a bit imperfect, however. If Andy Birtle had finished this in 2003, the US military might have been able to leverage its lessons for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the writing of the first two versions of the Army and Marines’ post-2001 counterinsurgency field manuals.

This gem of a book comprises eight full chapters on the development, propagation, and implementation of counterinsurgency and contingency operations doctrine. It begins with the immediate post-World War II period, explores the frenetic ferment in the domain of counterinsurgency during the first half of the 1960s, and culminates with the dearth of such doctrine during the waning years of the Vietnam War. It also includes a short introduction and a conclusion, the latter assessing the impact and value of the entire corpus of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine vis-à-vis the lack of military success in Vietnam. Avid students of doctrine will be enamored of this study as it includes many fascinating facts about the origins and permutations in counterinsurgency doctrinal concepts and lexicon in the 1960s, offering useful insights for today’s experts. A full read of this comprehensive work also unambiguously reinforces the notion that the irony and the repetition of history, with attendant doctrinal ideas, are indeed inexorable.

Throughout the pages of U.S. Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine readers will readily discern enduring truths that theorists and big-power armies learn and relearn, through the toil and blood of their soldiers, while prosecuting in-contact experiments with the latest doctrines. This work, by way of anecdotes and salient quotes, is full of testimony to the aforementioned. A short review cannot adequately and clearly elucidate the complex layers and links within and among the many doctrinal manuals examined in this study, but it can capture the most germane points. Among several conclusions in this book on this era of counterinsurgency, three merit some emphasis here. Firstly, imposing foreign political and societal values to engineer democratic institutions among people that may neither be capable of nor inclined to emulate western notions of democracy has proven an untenable endeavor more often than not. Birtle offers pithy quotes that underscore this fact, for example, “It is unwise to impose upon occupied territory the laws and customs of another people.” The author cogently reiterates the salience of this with, “The task of building social, political, and economic institutions in alien environments was more alchemy than science, a magical art that the sorcerers of academia—let alone their uniformed apprentices—only partially understood and imperfectly controlled.”

Although the author seems convinced that the US Army developed a good quality and quantity of counterinsurgency doctrine during the 1960s, it did so almost in the complete absence of other governmental agencies, ones that should have had an equal role in thinking about and implementing an integrated approach to counterinsurgency. In other words, the second helpful finding in this work was that the interagency piece during the Vietnam era was not functional and no amount of doctrine could overcome this shortcoming, particularly in a sphere of conflict where exercising all the elements of national power is crucial. According to Birtle, “The United States never developed an effective way to integrate and direct counterinsurgency activities at the national level.”

This veritable exegesis of myriad counterinsurgency manuals from that quarter century offers a third conclusive truism, with implications for Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Long War: Counterinsurgents cannot be successful without denying the insurgents sanctuary and external support. This is as true of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Afghanistan’s border as it was true of the Ho Chi Minh Trail on Vietnam’s border. The second major objective for the counterinsurgent, after isolating the insurgents from the population, must be to deny the insurgency access to external support. For example, the 1961 Field Manual 31-15, Counterguerrilla Operations,stated that experience had proven “that insurrections rarely achieved their full potential without access to external sanctuaries and sustenance.” Likewise, the US Army’s 2006 FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, essentially states the same thing about denying sanctuaries. U.S. Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine is full of many insights and fascinating facts; it represents thorough research and professional presentation. One interesting footnote in the beginning of the book shows how the early post-World War II doctrine relied heavily on the German Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan doctrine, including the notion of “hammer and anvil,” a concept which continued to appear in the US doctrinal lexicon on counterinsurgency until the end of the twentieth century. Doctrine is imperfect and flaws in counterinsurgency doctrine did partially contribute to the failure in Vietnam, but Birtle maintains that America’s most egregious errors lay in the realms of strategy and policy. History is a relentless mentor.


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## archade (Mar 23, 2008)

Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam. By Mark Bowden. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006. 680 pages.

Reviewed by Colonel Gregory Fontenot, USA Ret., director of the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Mark Bowden, once again, has produced a tour de force in his powerful narrative of the “hostage crisis” stemming from the seizure of the US Embassy in Iran on 4 November 1979. Bowden connects this “dot,” which many Iranians consider a crucial moment in their successful revolution, as important as Yorktown was to our own revolution, with the “war on terror.” In his epilogue, Bowden restates his thesis noting that the hostages, “Lived with the arrogance of Islamist certainty, which prompts otherwise decent men to acts of unflinching cruelty. My goal was to reconstruct their experience as they lived it. The men and women held hostage in Iran survived nearly fifteen months of unrelenting fear. They were the first victims of the inaptly named war on terror.”

Bowden delivers a riveting and rich narrative weaving the fabric of the story of the hostages, their captors, and more. His account of the efforts of the United States to free its emissaries marked by the sad failure at Desert One is still as painful to read nearly 30 years after the fact as it was to endure all those years ago.

Although Bowden does not deliver convincing proof of the connection that he claims exists between the successful assault on the US Embassy and the current “war with militant Islam,” his claim has the ring of truth. Nonetheless, proving the correlation remains. This shortcoming does not diminish the compelling power of his narrative. Arrogance, hubris, ignorance, cruelty, compassion, resistance, kindness, petty jealousy, courage, naiveté, and sheer stupidity are all found in abundant quantity among the Iranians and Americans who are the protagonists of this tale. Illuminating the very human foibles of everyone from the Iranian “students” who seized the embassy to Charlie Beckwith who led the failed rescue attempt forms the heart of story. This is Bowden at his best, facilitating rather than dictating. Bowden is not invisible, but nearly so, letting the players tell their story. He does so with few interventions, although his bent is unequivocally American. This is a tale well told from an American point of view. Bowden is not driven by his feelings, but not embarrassed by them either. The result is balanced, but reflects a number of conflicting emotions that are definitely those of an American.

Several themes emerge from the crisis that are reminiscent of most historical misadventures, but nonetheless warrant repetition since the lessons stemming from miscalculation, arrogance, and ignorance never seem to take. Neither President Jimmy Carter nor his counterparts in the curious government of Iranian politicians and mullahs understood each other or seemed to think critically about what their respective options might be. President Carter and his advisers made decisions that failed to consider the conditions in Iraq and imputed to the Iranians motivations not dissimilar from their own. In short, Iran would surely act in accordance with Iranian interests as discerned by Washington. The Iranians, although often unsophisticated and beset with internal contradictions based on an internecine struggle over the direction the revolution should take, frequently acted on the basis of domestic concerns rather than a thoughtful assessment of their strategic position. This should not have surprised the American leadership.

Both sides understood the semiotic power of the images from Teheran and Desert One, but the Iranians out performed the United States in waging what is now called information warfare. Their messages, often crude and almost laughably false proved powerful in Iran and outraged, according to Bowden, only the United States. Indeed as Bowden points out not even our allies offered tangible support to the United States despite the incredible and clearly illegal action of the government of Iran in neither preventing nor undoing the militants’ assault on long held conventions of behavior toward diplomats and their staff.

The disastrous rescue attempt that ended at Desert One, like all military disasters, seems somehow inevitable in retrospect. The efforts of Colonel Charlie Beckwith and the special operations troops read like a Greek tragedy. Beckwith, the hero, Bowden reveals is as flawed and as doomed to failure as any of those imagined by the Greeks. As courageous as Cardigan’s lancers who rode into the valley of death, many of the special operations troops proved more perceptive. One of them observed, before the mission, that the only difference between those who flew to Desert One and the defenders of the Alamo was that “Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” Military mishaps don’t just happen whether in the Crimea in the nineteenth century or in Iran in the twentieth century. Arrogance, confusion, and miscalculation all play a role in producing military disaster.

Finally, neither side understood the other nor seemed able to find the means to learn about the other. Bruce Laingen, the American charge d’ affairs who presided over what remained of the embassy after it drew down from a strength of 1,000 to 60 inhabitants, remained optimistic until the day the Iranians seized the embassy. He was surprised by the takeover despite warnings from the provisional government that they might not be able to control events. The Iranians for their part failed to understand the consequences of seizing the embassy among which included cutting themselves off from parts and support for American weapons found in abundance in their armed forces. Worse still for Iran and perhaps, America, the United States supported Iraq not Iran when Saddam Hussein attacked in the midst of the hostage crisis. Ignorance or at least not being able to perceive the problem from the point of view of others plagued both the bifurcated and chaotic government of Iran and that of the United States.

For those in the embassy compound, both Iranian and American, the weeks and ultimately months the crisis lasted revealed all the best and worst traits found in humans. Most of the young Iranians who held the compound, acting on passions based on slogans rather than careful thought, proved unbearably ignorant and spouted the most outrageous diatribes. But what is eerie about the hateful “death to America” rants is how familiar they sound even now. The Iranian mythology surrounding CIA intervention and various supposed American conspiracies is based at least on a kernel of truth. Iranian paranoia seems absurd given the facts in 1979. All three members of the CIA team in Teheran in 1979 were new. None of them spoke Farsi and they inherited a station which included virtually no agents. The Iranian impression of American prowess in clandestine intervention coupled with revolutionary zeal overlain with a veneer of religious superiority played a role in stimulating the assault on the embassy and the cruelty shown to the hostages in the ensuing months.

But the Iranians were not uniformly cruel or even mean spirited. Among their numbers were those who proved compassionate and able to see in their American prisoners people like themselves. The Americans too proved diverse. Some among the hostages were loathed by their colleagues and captors alike. Some collaborated with their captors, some did some of the time, and some never did. All of them lived for more than a year uncertain about their fate and compelled to endure whatever came their way. However fearful the most fearful of them proved, they all showed courage at one point or another and throughout the entire experience it is useful to remember they were the victims, not the Iranians.

Guests of the Ayatollah is well told. Bowden has brought together important threads that the first person accounts of those taken in siege of the embassy were largely unable to tell—the efforts to free them and the Iranian perspective. Bowden’s synthesis is important as a reminder that human behavior under stress runs the gamut from commendable to contemptible. What he does not say, but rather leads us to is that these facts contribute to arrogance which when combined with ignorance almost certainly produces miscalculation leading to inevitably tragic and far reaching outcomes.


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## archade (Mar 23, 2008)

Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. By Richard H. Shultz, Jr., and Andrea J. Dew. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 328 pages.

Reviewed by Colonel Glenn Alexander Crowther, Research Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.

Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew of the Fletcher School at Tufts University have produced an excellent primer on the nature of warfare and our likely enemies in the twenty-first century.

Starting with the end of the Cold War, US investment in military capability has produced a military against whom no one can stand in conventional state-on-state warfare—so they won’t. Instead, the authors point out that we will face proud warriors who come from cultures that inspire them with centuries of martial tradition.

The book opens with several chapters related to the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century and insight into the cultures that the United States may encounter as it seeks to stabilize the world as part of the Long War. The authors provide a well-thought-out view of the cultures in question, concentrating primarily on tribal societies. In three chapters that address “War After the Cold War,” “Assessing Enemies,” and “Tribes and Clans,” the authors posit that these tribal societies will comprise the enemies of the future for the United States. The nature of these societies have led to a preferred type of warfare—decentralized, violent, and family-based. When faced with an extremely potent conventional threat, these societies turn to the fundamentals they have always known: the ambush, the raid, and other techniques that western militaries associate with insurgency and asymmetric warfare.

The book continues with four chapters devoted to discussion of recent theaters of conflict: Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Each chapter examines in-depth the society in question, analyzing the structure of family-based groups that comprise these organizations. Additionally, each chapter discusses the involvement of militaries from developed countries applicable to the particular case. These chapters provide details of what went wrong in a given scenario and why, emphasizing both the nature of the society in the country in question as well as the decisionmaking process exercised by outside forces.

This lack of a centralized state that makes family-based societies viable in the twenty-first century is the same characteristic often found in weaker states that do not have the ability to provide good governance. This failing makes these locales attractive to transnational criminal and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. In such instances, the United States may engage the threat in an effort to impose stability. The target is never the local culture, but rather the lack of stability that US forces are seeking to address. The US presence in these areas inevitably comes into conflict with local power structures. Locals will almost always seek to drive away any foreign interlopers. The United States’ reliance on quick, kinetic solutions when faced with such attacks can lead to years of warfare. It is precisely the type of warfare that these family-based systems have specialized in for millennia.

One theme concurrent throughout the book is the propensity for militaries and policymakers in developed countries to underestimate the warfighting capacity inherent in these tribal/clan based societies. The authors go into great detail regarding the mishaps suffered by the British, Russians, and United States in the four countries reviewed. They posit that in each case, success might have been possible if security specialists had taken certain precautions and adopted a more flexible approach. Shultz and Dew also provide recommendations for security specialists and policymakers to use in future conflicts in regions dominated by instability.

Although the book does not necessarily plow new ground in terms of understanding different cultures, it does distill extant knowledge into a form readily understandable by today’s military professional. Although some aspects of the individual country studies are a bit detailed for the average reader, the overall effect is to provide insight into a world very different from our own. In addition, the authors are able to educate the practicing professional regarding what mistakes to avoid when operating in these environments.

As with all of Shultz’s works, this book is thoroughly researched and impressively referenced. The authors provide insight to not only popular writings on culture such as Culture Matters by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, but also less well-known treatises such as Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald Horowitz and Ted Robert Gurr’s Minorities at Risk. Any serious student of culture will find a worthwhile framework for pursuing such studies in this work. But it is the professional warfighter who will profit most from the book.

From soldiers on the ground to Combatant Commanders, to the Pentagon, and to politicians on Capitol Hill, everyone who specializes in international security matters on behalf of the United States should read this book. Additionally, the book describes the environment in which Army, Marine, and special operations forces will be operating for the foreseeable future. Sun Tzu implores us to know our enemy. Shultz and Dew have provided us with a superb roadmap to pursue that imperative. This book goes a long way in allowing the reader to get to know his opponent. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not ready the next time.


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## archade (Apr 11, 2008)

John Gargus. The Son Tay Raid: American POWs in Vietnam Were Not Forgotten. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. xv + 332 pp. Illustrations, maps, photos, glossary, appendices, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-1-58544-622-3. 

Reviewed for H-War by Earl H. Tilford, Department of History, Grove City College 

Special Operations at Its Best 

John Gargus, a career U.S. Air Force special operations officer, provides the best account yet of the Son Tay raid, an operation undertaken deep into North Vietnam during the early morning hours of November 22, 1970 to rescue seventy American prisoners of war (POWs) held in a notoriously bad camp only twenty-six miles outside Hanoi. This exciting, well-documented, crisply written account is a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on special operations during the Vietnam War. Gargus brings to the book not only his expertise but his personally acquired insights as a navigator on one of the Lockheed C-130 four-engine turbo-prop transports supporting the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service Sikorsky HH-53 "Jolly Green Giant" helicopters ferrying Army Special Forces commandos to the prison camp.

Gargus goes into far more detail than did Benjamin F. Schemmer's account The Raid (1976) or this author's chapter on the raid in A History of U.S. Air Force Search and Rescue Operations in Southeast Asia, 1961-1976, published by the Office of Air Force History in 1981. Gargus used official Air Force studies, after-action reports, previously classified intelligence briefings, personal interviews with participants, recorded interviews held at the Air Force Historical Research Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, along with North Vietnamese accounts of the raid recently translated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Historians of the Vietnam War will be amply satisfied with the depth and extent of Gargus' research. The book is important because the Son Tay raid was exceptional in three significant ways. 

First, the detailed planning provided for any conceivable contingencies or impediments that might arise. Planners considered every possible contingency and devised options for overcoming any impediment. Additionally, the training, conducted on Eglin Air Force Base's swampy wilderness, where I once braved alligators, water moccasins, mosquitoes, and wild boar as part of a survival, evasion, and escape course, was so thorough that the raiders knew almost exactly what they would encounter once they hit the ground in North Vietnam. 

 Second, security was iron-clad. The raiders intended to be stopped by only one of two things: a major security lapse or unexpectedly heavy enemy resistance. Elaborate security precautions included using military counterintelligence agents to shadow the raiders during their off-duty hours, and devising the code name "Operation Ivory Coast," a deliberate reference to Africa, to confuse the curious. As for enemy resistance, Air Force Brigadier General Leroy J. Manor and Army Special Forces Colonel Arthur D. "Bull" Simons, the men who conceived the raid, personally selected the Army Special Forces and Air Force Special Operations personnel. Simons, who spent his entire career in covert operations, was part of a similar raid conducted during the Second World War to free American prisoners from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. 

I can attest to the excellent security. On the night the raid took place, I was the intelligence duty officer at Headquarters Seven, Thirteenth Air Force located at Udorn Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand, from whence the raiders departed. During the days immediately preceding the raid, base personnel noticed an influx of men and women in civilian clothes who stayed together, not mingling with the 5,000 officers and airmen assigned to Udorn. The longish hair of the males and the large number of females in the contingent led us to conclude they were military physicians and nurses. We had no clue as to why they were present. Furthermore the major general in charge of air operations in 
Laos, my boss, was sound asleep at 2:00 a.m. when I awakened him to report "something big going down up North." When he asked me what, I told him we did not know but electronic intercepts of enemy communications indicated some kind of invasion supported by extensive air operations. The first I read of the raid was at noon the next day in the Bangkok Post. 

 Finally, although the raiders felt they failed because no prisoners were recovered from Son Tay because the North Vietnamese had moved the captives to other prisons in July, the operation was a strategic success. By late 1970, American troop withdrawals were underway and, except for "protective reaction" strikes flown against anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missile sites that fired on Air Force and Navy reconnaissance aircraft, there had been virtually no bombing of the upper two thirds of North Vietnam. Leaders in Hanoi, confident of victory after the United States pulled out its forces, proved increasingly obdurate at the Paris peace talks. Putting a large American force on the ground, twenty-six miles from the heart of Hanoi, keeping them there for nearly two hours while they searched the abandoned prison for captives, and then bringing the force out without suffering a single casualty (while also killing a couple hundred enemy soldiers) got their attention. Prisoners held in outlying camps reported their captors moved them into the major camps in Hanoi to prevent future rescue attempts. Prisoners also reported improved treatment and a decline in systematic torture. 

The Son Tay Raid will prove a valuable addition to the library of any Vietnam War scholar, military, or aviation historian. The uninitiated may find Gargus's attention to operational detail, like specifying time-to-turn for each inbound leg of the flight into the heart of enemy country, to be somewhat tedious. The author provides a detailed glossary of acronyms and avoids the use of passive voice which plagues some operational and tactical accounts. After spending a few minutes in the glossary and appendices, anyone with a passing interest in military affairs can read and appreciate this excellent operational history. > John Gargus's The Son Tay Raid is operational history at its very best.


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## archade (Apr 18, 2008)

Risa A. Brooks and Elizabeth A. Stanley, eds. Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. ix + 252 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-8047-5399-9. 

 Reviewed for H-War by Jonas Hagmann, Political Science Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva 

The Difficult Reconceptualization of Military Power 

 Comprising a conceptual framework, seven substantive chapters, a critical individual synthesis reflecting on the book itself and a summary conclusion, this edited book provides a set of constructive conceptual and empirical contributions to international relations, political science, and military studies. Its key argument is that national military power is too often simplistically equated with states' material and human resources, ignoring the divergent effectiveness with which states make actual use of them.[1] Cultural and societal factors, political institutions, and pressure from the international arena, so the argument goes, are all important factors that affect such an extraction. An extended analysis of the sources of military power is thus warranted--and indeed, the book is squarely situated in the broader political science turn toward nonmaterial explanations of politics and power.[2] Risa Brooks's introductory chapter sets out the book's analytical framework, explaining how in different instances of security policymaking, cultural, social, and political factors influence a nation's capacity to convert its basic resources into military power. 
This effectiveness is captured by the military's ability to develop internally consistent contingency plans ("integration"), its ability to react to evolving domestic and external challenges ("responsiveness"), the skills of military personnel ("skill"), and the military's material equipment ("quality"). 

The substantive chapters address the cultural, societal, and political sources of "military effectiveness" one by one. Writing on post-Meiji Japan, Dan Reiter (chapter 2) argues that nationalist ideology served Japanese leaders to recruit more soldiers, to harden their loyalty, and at its height, even to develop suicide attacks as new strategic options. Timothy Hoyt (chapter 3) focuses on the impact of social cleavages in Iraq between 1980 and 2004. The regime's reliance on specific ethnic groups, he argues, not only diminished its army's recruitment base: the politicization in officer promotion also ran counter to merit-based promotions, and adversely affected the professional capacity of Iraqi high command. 

Deborah Avant (chapter 4) looks into the effects of more formalized institutions on military effectiveness. Comparing the United States to the United Kingdom, she argues that militaries are straightforwardly exposed to the evolving demands of the civilian political leadership in parliamentary democracies, as militaries cannot capitalize on a division of power between the executive leadership and the parliamentary majority. In presidential systems, militaries are thus seen as more independent and capable of developing their own professional standards. Looking at the Vietnam and the Boer wars respectively, this leaves Avant to conclude that while the U.S. system produces skilled and high-quality armed forces, the British political system has an advantage in fostering integrated policies and responsive planning structures. 

 Brooks herself also contributes a substantive chapter on civil-military relations in Egypt (chapter 5). Focusing on the delicate balance between civilian dominance and military authority, she argues that competition between the two fosters inefficiency overall, for instance when office appointments become contested and contradictory, or when strategic plans clash in wartime. Supportive of this claim, Brooks finds Gamal Abdel Nasser's unsuccessful 1967 campaign against Israel to be marked by such inefficiency. In contrast, Anwar Sadat's surprise attack of October 1973--widely judged to be a most competent military operation--is considered the result of his successful subordination of the army. 

After these analyses of domestic factors, Theo Farrell and Emily Goldman expand the view to address the implementations and impact of international norms. Farrell (chapter 6) illustrates how, pushed by international standards, the newly born Irish Republic adopted a conventional standing army in the 1920s and 1930s--although it neither fitted with the country's limited resources nor addressed its main challenge of the time, civil unrest. In a very traditional neorealist analysis of the international system's dynamics, Goldman (chapter 7) suggests across nineteen hypotheses that the degree and diversity of threats affect military effectiveness as well. In her view, the distant but single Japanese threat to the United States in the interwar period allowed the U.S. Navy to set clear priorities and to auto-evaluate its effectiveness by increasingly stringent professional standards. Britain however was challenged by multiple threats at this time, which in Goldman's view made it impossible for its leaders and navy to develop consistent and capable security policies. 

 In the last substantive chapter, Nora Bensahel (chapter 8) asks whether alliances do indeed aggregate power, or whether military effectiveness is not being lost in tactical coordination and strategic planning. Bensahel finds that while alliances introduce redundancies and contradictions into military effectiveness, they do yield considerable political benefits when they legitimize multinational interventions abroad. 

Overall, the book's conceptual framework is well applied across the chapters--a result which edited books too often fail to deliver. But as Stephan Biddle also recognizes in his critical synthesis at the end of the book, readers will note a number of sometimes central shortcomings and problems in both the overall conceptualization and individual chapters. 

 In this vein it is important to indicate the lack of attention the book gives to the interaction of the independent variables identified: it remains plainly unclear how the co-presence of factors such as societal cleavages or political institutions affect national military effectiveness overall. Which of them operate independently of each other; which cast contradictory effects on military effectiveness; and which actually reinforce each other? The book's framework is ambitious, and as such it does deserve recognition for the differentiated and complex research program that it seeks to establish. But the absence of a complex case study integrating all seven identified sources of military effectiveness creates a sense that the manuscript has not been  pushed to its logical endpoint. 

Similarly, confusion remains as to what standard "effectiveness" is actually being measured by. This confusion is epitomized by the very notion of "military effectiveness," which is invoked as a conceptual shortcut throughout the text. Does "military effectiveness" focus on states' ability to generate military power, or does it indicate the military's effectiveness to achieve specific aims? The conceptual chapter chooses the former meaning, and case studies argue how culture, societal, and other factors influence the "integration," "responsiveness," "skills," and "quality" of a national army from the inside. But confusingly, the case study observations themselves are located in contexts where national armies conflict with opponents. 

De facto, this is a research strategy which, by introducing dyadic interactions into the analysis, gives sudden and implicit weight to the military's effectiveness to conduct battle. Hoyt in particular reiterates the point that the 2003 Iraqi defeat against United States-led forces "all too clearly demonstrated its ineffectiveness" (p.76). This raises the question whether the effectiveness of states in creating power can be estimated without comparisons to external adversaries. In one way or another, virtually all chapters make such comparisons to ground their assessments: Goldman judges U.S. naval effectiveness in opposition to the "Japanese threat" and British army effectiveness in contrast to Boer armaments and tactics; Brooks evaluates Egyptian "military effectiveness" against the backdrop of two engagements with the Israeli Army; and Farrell sketches the new Irish 
Army's utility through a comparison with local guerrillas. It is regrettable that although Biddle indicates this problematic, the editorial conclusion does not take up this central point. 

 In sum and despite these conceptual challenges, Creating Military Power provides a rather well-accomplished and differentiated analysis of the manifold sources of military power, making it a welcomed contribution to the ongoing reconceptualization of military power. With latent U.S. ethnocentrism in some of its chapters, it is also recommendable to all those interested in the state of current U.S. scholarship on international security studies. 

Notes 

[1]. Hans Joachim Morgenthau, _Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948). 

[2]. Jeffrey T. Checkel, "The Constructivist Turn in International  Relations Theory," World Politics 50, no. 2 (January 1998): 324-348.


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## archade (May 1, 2008)

Lloyd Steffen. Holy War, Just War: Exploring the Moral Meaning of Religious Violence. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. xxviii + 300 pp. Notes, index, ISBN 978-0-7425-5848-9.

Reviewed for H-Catholic by Elizabeth A. Linehan, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph's University

Religious Ultimacy and Moral Vision: The Challenge of Violence

Violence committed in the name of religion is a particularly troubling feature of our world. Certainly the phenomenon is not new; think of the Crusades. The forms it takes today seem particularly acute and threatening, however. Lloyd Steffen recalls these examples in the preface to his book on religious violence: the People's Temple suicides; the Branch Davidian events in Waco, Texas; the Aum Shinrikyo gassings in Tokyo; and of course the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Many responses to the connection of violence with religion are possible. On one hand, perhaps those doing the violence have misinterpreted religion or their own religious tradition so that the violence is not
a product of "true" religion. Religion is reflective of a good God, and so its counsels rightly understood are necessarily good. At the other extreme, some argue that the destructive potential of religion is strong reason for eradicating it. I think here of Christopher Hitchens's writings, notably God Is Not Great (2007).

Lloyd Steffen maintains that religion is powerful and it is dangerous. It is powerful in that it motivates action: "in human culture religion is something people do" (p. 7). It is dangerous because of its potential for creating violence. It is a virtue of Steffen's book that he does not beg the question of religion's necessary goodness. "Goodness" is a moral category, and religion can be good or bad. It is also a virtue that the discovery of destructive potential within religion does not lead him to reject it wholesale. Instead, he stakes out the moderate middle ground.

Steffen's strategy is to examine the ways people choose to be religious from the moral point of view. He claims, with ample justification, that religious practice can be life-affirming, but it can also be life-destroying or, as he says, "demonic" (chapter 3 is entitled "Being Religious: the Demonic Option"). The key differentiating factor is whether what a religion takes to be "ultimate" is also considered "absolute." "Violence," he says, "emerges from religion only when Ultimacy is transformed and becomes equated with the idea of the Absolute" (p. 23). The notions of "ultimacy" and "absolutism" are so central to Steffen's discussion that I wish he had defined them more precisely than he does. An approximation for "ultimacy" is "that than which no greater can be conceived," following Anselm's famous ontological argument (p. 15). A clearer definition is "a source of meaning that has no superior and cannot be transcended" (p. 15). Ultimacy does not have to be conceived in absolutist terms; that is, as a concept that "suffers no restrictions, admits no limitations, and allows no exceptions" (p. 25). In the abstract, however, it is unclear to me how "ultimacy" escapes becoming absolutized. Steffen's analysis of three ways religious people respond to violence, in the second part of the book, does help to clarify what he is criticizing and what he is endorsing. In many ways the discussion of pacifism, holy war, and just war is the richest and most valuable part of the book. Each of these can be found in life-affirming religious forms, and in demonic forms. Although it is initially surprising to find pacifism portrayed in its demonic form, as Steffen does here, he is surely correct that there are radical forms of pacifism that disengage from human society and allow evil to be perpetrated without opposition.
His Tolstoy-Gandhi contrast, representing life-denying and life-affirming commitments to nonviolence, is well made. The form of radical pacifism Tolstoy eventually embraced is an absolute (exceptionless) rejection of force of any kind, and ultimately of engagement with human institutions in defense of the good of life. Thus he leaves the field to the forces of evil. Gandhi, on the other hand, advocated nonviolent resistance to evil. Steffens says, of Gandhi's key principle of satyagraha, "As a nonabsolutist form of nonviolent but morally engaged pacifism, satyagraha serves to expand the goods of life, promote the goods of life, and enact a vision of goodness" (p. 81).

The examination of holy war focuses primarily on Islam, although the chapter begins with an examination of ancient Israel. "Holy war" is defined generically as "any use of force justified by appeal to divine authority" (p. 182). The moral presumption is against holy wars, precisely because appeal to God's will seems to transcend moral critique. With regard to Islam in particular, Steffen concludes: "Whether Islam could advance the possibility of a holy war that is non-demonic and life-affirming must be subjected to moral critique independent of any appeal for justification to heaven … but Islam. itself does not sanction such a move" (p. 229).

For American readers who lack wide acquaintance with Islamic traditions, the detail and nuance of this section are especially valuable. Steffen shows that resources exist within Muslim traditions to critique claims that particular wars are willed by God. He also distinguishes "jihad" from "holy war," and shows how "jihad" can be interpreted in a life-affirming way. Careful reading will provide ammunition against current stereotypes of Islam.

Steffen's discussion of just war covers ground that is more familiar to Western philosophers. I am in essential agreement with his construal of the theory, including his insistence that a moral presumption against the use of force "underwrites" the theory (p. 242). In its structure, a strong basic assumption with the possibility of justified exceptions (when the use of force is warranted), just war theory exemplifies the sort of moral thinking Steffen has all along implicitly appealed to, against absolutist claims.

A reader's response to this book will depend on the extent to which s/he accepts some assumptions which Steffen relies on but does not really defend. There are many, but the most central is that moral evaluation can count on widely or universally shared moral presumptions. It depends, also, on one's response to the dilemma Socrates posed in the Euthyphro: Is piety good because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is good? If we are religious, should we determine what God would have us do based on our conception of the life-affirming and good, or should we depend on some revelation from God (whose ways are not our ways)? Steffen makes clear just how much turns on the answer to this classic question.


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## archade (May 1, 2008)

James Akerman and Robert Karrow, eds. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. London: Chicago University Press, 2007. 336 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-226-01075-5. 

Reviewed for H-HistGeog by Veronica della Dora, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol 

Finding Our Way through Maps? 

"Maps do not tell you just where things are, but who we are," Robert Karrow states in his introduction to Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. Inherently selective and ethnocentric, maps tell us "how we exist and function in the world, how we find our place in the world." In this sense maps, the volume's co-editor suggests, are much more than "scientific instruments": they are artifacts speaking "of the historical and cultural circumstances and interests of map makers" (p. 17). As such, they should be considered less as "windows on the world" than as windows on social and cultural worlds; in other words, they need to be appreciated in their cultural, historical, and artistic specificity, rather than in terms of mere "accuracy." Of course, such views have challenged traditional narratives of "cartographic progress" for almost two decades, and today they are taken for granted by most English-speaking historians of cartography--but perhaps not by the general public.[1] Maps repackages these ideas for a general audience of nonspecialists in an accessible and in most cases compelling way through a multitude of cartographic examples from different epochs and cultural contexts, from Assyrian plans and Aztec diagrams to medieval itineraries and nineteenth-century American city plans and census maps.

The volume stems from one of the largest and most ambitious map exhibitions ever held in North America. A collaborative enterprise by Chicago's Field Museum and the Newberry Library, the exhibition Maps: Finding Our Place in the World features 130 original maps, including pieces from ancient Rome and Babylonia, maps made by Leonardo da Vinci and J. R. R. Tolkien, and some of the latest map-related digital technologies.[2] However, while bearing the same title as the exhibition, Karrow emphasizes, Maps is not a catalogue, but a companion volume offering a "wider ranging excursion into the history and interpretation of cartography" (p. 17). Grouping seven illustrated essays by an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, the volume provides not only an accessible introduction to maps and their history, 
but also to a "new" cultural history of cartography, no longer content to narrate maps in terms of "accuracy." 

Maps_' divulgative, rather than strictly scholarly, aims--"this is not a history of cartography" (p. 2)--are reflected in the colorful attire of the book, in its friendly, sometimes almost informal, narrative style, as well as in its structure. Moving away from the traditional chronological or "civilizational" narrative, the seven chapters are arranged according to maps' different "functions": from "basic" ones, such as orientation and localization at different scales (from the global to the local), to their functions as instruments for narrating (and making) history, as visual devices enabling access to invisibilities, and finally, as material commodities.
The chapters are preceded by Robert Karrow's general introduction, in which the reader is guided through the "basics," from what a map is, to key aspects of contemporary history of cartography. In the first part of the introduction issues of scale, selectivity, legibility, power, and authority are presented--much in the spirit of Denis Wood and the late 
J. B. Harley. The second part summarily explains how scholarship in the history of cartography has changed over the past couple of decades. In so doing, it also sets up an agenda for the book, indicating how "cross-culturalism," "interdisciplinarity," broader chronological perspectives and definitions of "map," and finally, less concern with "great men" and notions of "progress," can be linked to specific chapters of the book, and in some cases to the book as a whole. 

All the following seven chapters treat maps from different historical periods, and while the book as a whole is inevitably dominated by Western traditions (and slightly privileges North America), some chapters (1, 2, and partly 3 and 7) use a range of maps from other cultures, stressing the universality of mapping as a mode of communication, but also showing differences and syncretisms that challenge linear discourses of modern cartography as a monolithic Western enterprise. In chapter 1, James Akerman, the exhibition's co-curator, offers an extensive survey of "way-finding" maps, from an Egyptian papyrus dating from 1160 BCE and Chinese route maps drawn on wooden boards (300 BCE) through the famous Peutinger Table, medieval itineraries, portolan charts and stick charts from the Marshall Islands, to modern air charts, tube maps, hospital floor plans, and street atlases. Way-finding maps, the author observes, are commonly understood as "pragmatic" devices defining route choices, identifying landmarks, providing directions. This chapter challenges this assumption, revealing their complex historical genealogies, but also "less visible" functions, such as directing customers to specific routes rather than others through their compositional rhetorics, and enabling armchair travellers and pilgrims to undertake imaginative inner journeys, thus serving as instruments for moral self-improvement (as in the case of medieval itineraries). 

Chapters 2 (by Denis Cosgrove) and 3 (by Matthew Edney) treat respectively cartographic representations of the world (and the broader cosmos) and parts of it. While the first category is relatively easy to "map" and encourages cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons, the second is more slippery, encompassing a virtually infinite number of maps from town plans to maps of the continents. Revisiting themes from his Apollo's Eye[3] and complementing them with non-Western examples, Cosgrove shows how all world maps are "inescapably ethnocentric," featuring a "normalized centre" and "othering the edges" (p. 69). However, the author seems to imply, it is also important to grasp differences: Gerardus Mercator's and Arno Peter's projections are inherently ideological and have been highly politicized; on the other hand Aztec diagrams, Buddhist mandalas, but also Western medieval mappae mundi and even early-modern world maps, such as Ortelius's Typus Orbis Terrarum_ were produced as meditational devices comparable to the itineraria described by Akerman. Many of these representations often encapsulate deep mystical meanings, and cannot therefore be treated in the same way as, say, a nineteenth-century map of the British Empire. On the other hand, choosing his examples mainly from urban plans, property mappings, but also maps of postcolonial nation-states, Edney privileges a more univocal (almost Harleian)--and from my point of view less original--reading which highlights the social relations and power dynamics embedded in (this type of) maps. As a result, obvious pre-Enlightenment traditions of "mapping parts of the world" such as that of island books are surprisingly absent (perhaps as a possible challenge to "colonialist" claims about Western maps). 

Maps as instruments for (conceptual and physical) colonization and for shaping national identities is a theme reopened in chapter 4. Here historian Susan Schulten considers cartographic examples linked to particular events in American history, both as media enabling citizens to understand those events, and, perhaps more problematically (from the researcher's point of view), as nonhuman actors themselves shaping the events. The chapter proceeds chronologically, presenting "landmark maps" in American history (e.g., Martin Waldseemüller's world map, Guillaume Delisle's map of Louisiana, the "slave map" said to have been repeatedly studied by Abraham Lincoln, etc.), but also "popular" maps featured in Second World War and contemporary newspapers--these latter maps being less famous, and yet no less crucial in shaping the American geographical imagination about the nation and its place in the world. 

Chapters 5 and 6 both deal with invisibilities made visible through maps. In the former, psychologist Michael Friendly and geographer Gilles Palsky bring together (even though perhaps not as straightforwardly as the other chapters) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific diagrams, statistical graphs, geological, and thematic maps. Like diagrams and graphs, thematic and geological maps are "more intellectual construction than straightforward depiction of the land surface" (p. 213). Palski and Friendly connect these types of Enlightenment mappings to new perceptions of nature and society. Unlike Schulten's, this chapter seems to focus exclusively on "official" scientific mappings--mappings often conceived as moral projects on society. 
Surprisingly, however, it does not mention the popular thematic maps that worked from "within society itself," such as, for example, those of school atlases and textbooks, and more characteristically the "imaginary" maps published by the Society for Useful Knowledge. On these maps isolated physical features (the longest rivers, the highest mountains, etc.) were brought together in a comparative, normative framework, participating in the creation of a new "universal" language, often uncritically transposed to the social sciences and racist discourses.[4] "Great men's" contributions, such as Alexander von Humboldt's, on the other hand, are treated in the chapter, but I personally found the discussion partial and at times cursory and disconnected from relevant scholarship.[5] I was surprised, for example, that cross-section profiles (which would have provided a strong link between geological and Humboldtian mappings) did not feature among the examples. 

The following chapter (by Ricardo Padron) discusses mappings of other types of "invisibilities": those of fictional places, ranging from Dante's Hell and Thomas More's Utopia, to Tolkien's Middle Earth and the fantasy game World of Warcraft. Padron, a Spanish literature scholar, interrogates the controversial relationship between maps and literature, the former involving "visibility, stasis, hierarchy, and control,"whereas the latter often works "to subvert these things" (p. 265). While the range and significance of the examples makes the chapter inherently interesting and appropriate in the collection, I did not find the discussion particularly original, or convincing. For example, I found general assumptions such as that maps in fictional accounts offer "different kinds of evidence to prove that they are telling us the truth" (p. 268) problematic, especially when applied equally to types of fiction as different as More's Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). 

While the collection (and contemporary history of cartography in general) emphasizes the visual power of maps, in the last chapter art historian Diane Dillon moves away from the notion of maps as mere graphic representations, inviting the reader to re-think them as material commodities. Maps are thus narrated as ornamental objects, collectibles, and status symbols, especially in the Renaissance, as deluxe copies of atlases and isolari testify, along with Dutch oil paintings featuring globes and maps. Dillon also discusses maps as "cheaper" and yet no less intriguing commodities: for example, as advertisements distributed together with coffee bottles and other goods as premiums, as fancy souvenirs, and home references helping their users "move between the exotic and the familiar" (p. 317). One of the most interesting examples brought to light by the author is that of nineteenth-century customizable county atlases, in which purchasers, upon payment, could have their biographical information included and their portraits engraved on landscape representations and maps (just as today Google Earth users often add videos of family parties, weddings, or newborn babies in conjunction with their own towns!). The gendered nature of certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "cartifacts" is also discussed in the chapter. The most curious examples include a memorial lady's glove of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition featuring a map of London, embroidered maps of England, a Chinese silk fan featuring a map of the twenty-three provinces of the Great Qing, and a powder horn incised by a soldier with a map of the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys. 
Finally, the chapter discusses the intriguing and understudied micro-geographies that surround these and other cartographic objects, such as the customer's sensuous, bodily engagement with maps, or the significance of the places in which maps are displayed. 

Looking back at _Maps_ as whole, I think that the scope and the audience of the project inevitably set a number of limitations. For example, while the volume succeeds as a compelling and accessible introduction to maps and their history, in most cases it tends to synthesize and repeat past work, relying heavily on secondary sources (especially the ongoing History of Cartography project), rather than engaging with or adding to current scholarly debate. Furthermore, like any collection (and like maps themselves!), Maps is unavoidably selective. This selectivity is not limited to the choice of case studies and themes. Despite the contributors' varied disciplinary provenance, certain types of readings seem to me to be more exploited than others, presenting a new history of cartography somehow "more Harleian" (or "Woodian") and less polyvocal than current academic studies in the history of cartography would allow for. Emphasis is often placed on the social, on power, and on maps' authority, in some cases obscuring other crucial functions of certain types of maps, such as the emblematic, the meditative (which are mentioned only in Cosgrove's chapter and hinted at in Akerman's), or the mnemonic.[6] Ignorance of these aspects in the interpretation of Renaissance (or medieval maps) sometimes leads to overgeneralizations, or proves misleading. For example, the map of Utopia in More's book was not simply meant to materialize a non-place "before the reader's eyes," as Pardon suggests. It also served an important emblematic (and thus moral) function, as an object of meditation on death. As Malcolm Bishop has recently shown, Ambrosius Holbein hid a skull behind the second version of the map, as a memento mori well representative of the Neo-stoic tradition of which More and Erasmus from Rotterdam were part.[7] 

Focusing on maps as "finite products," rather than on their production, Maps also inevitably omits other important "trends" in the new cultural history of cartography, such as, for example, mapping as a cognitive embodied practice.[8] More surprisingly, contemporary map artwork, which is attracting increasing attention by historians of cartography and cultural geographers, is also significantly downplayed 
(except for a short paragraph at the end of Pardon's chapter), just as the subversive and creative potential of maps exploited by modern artists is. In other words, how about "getting lost with maps"?[9] 

In spite of these limitations, Maps remains an enjoyable collection of high-standard essays, many of which could be profitably used in an introductory class in history of cartography. Furthermore, even if some maps are discussed in different chapters but pictured just in one and the reader occasionally has to flip back and forth, the variety, quantity, and quality of illustrations (189, all in color) is truly exceptional for a non-catalogue. Maps will certainly speak to a vast audience of map collectors and map lovers, but will also appeal to 
academics wanting to familiarize with maps, or get a sense of current scholarship in the field. Among the long list of "famous" maps and secondary sources, historians of cartography and cultural geographers will find some wonderful understudied cartographic gems, which might encourage (and certainly deserve) further study. Specialists will also find some "methodological gems." For example, Dillon's chapter, which I personally found the most original and innovative of the whole collection, proposes a completely new way of looking at maps, which (perhaps unconsciously) parallels broader recent turns to material culture, phenomenology, and performance in the humanities, and might serve as a stimulus for new research directions in history of cartography.[10] 

Notes 

  [1]. See Matthew Edney, "Cartography without Progress: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking," Cartographica 30 (1993): 54-68; and Christian Jacob, "Towards a Cultural History of Cartography," Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 91-98. 

[2]. Time Out Chicago 142, Nov. 15-21, 2007. 

[3]. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 

[4]. See, for example, Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye, 176-204; Avril Maddrell, "Discourses of Race and Gender and the Comparative Method in Geography School Texts, 1830-1918," Society and Space 16 (1998): 81-103; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 

[5]. See, for example, Anne Marie Godwleska, Geography Unbound (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael Dettelbach, "Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire: Humboldt's Physical Portrait of the Tropics," in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller and Paul Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 258-292. 

[6]. See Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 2006). 

[7]. Malcolm Bishop, "Ambrosius Holbein's Memento Mori Map for Sir Thomas More's Utopia: The Meanings of a Masterpiece of EarlySixteenth-Century Graphic Art,"British Dental Journal   199 (2005): 107-112. 

[8]. See, for example, Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, "Visual histories: John Septimus Roe and the Art of Navigation, c. 1815-1830," History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 145-161; Luciana Martins "Mapping Tropical Waters," in Mappings, ed. David Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 148-168. 

[9]. See, for example, David Pinder, "Subverting Cartography: the Situationists and Maps of the City," Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405-427; and recent reports in Cultural Geography's column "Cultural Geographies in Practice." 

[10]. See, for example, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice, eds., Photographs, Objects, Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)


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## archade (May 1, 2008)

Patrice Higonnet. Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History. New York: Other Press, 2007. L + 378 pp. Notes, index, ISBN 978-1-59051-235-7.

Reviewed for H-Nationalism by Lotfi Ben Rejeb, Department of History, University of Ottawa

*Split-Personality Nation*

Patrice Higonnet is a distinguished professor of French history at Harvard. A specialist of the French Revolution, he also wrote a comparative history of France and the United States in _Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism_ (1988). His latest book focuses on the nature and history of American nationalism.

The title of his book is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt's historic statement during the American-Filipino War. The "fight with savages," said Roosevelt, often involves blamable atrocities, but "to withdraw from the contest for civilization because of the fact that there are attendant cruelties" would be "utterly unworthy of a great people" (p. xxii). For Roosevelt, America was essentially right and need not be hampered by minor and inevitable occurrences of collateral damage along the way. Higonnet argues that America's attendant cruelties are not minor, are deeply at odds with America's democratic and liberal creed, and are utterly unworthy of a great nation. Coinciding with the preeminence of American power in the world, _Attendant Cruelties_ is meant to explain the behavior of the United States through an assessment of the causes and effects of American nationalism. This is a timely book that speaks of the past and to the future. To define the nature of the American national idea, Higonnet settled on a crucial nuance between patriotism and nationalism as argued by Ernest Renan, John Lukacs and Alain Touraine, among others. The gist of the nuance is that patriotism tends towards inclusion, while nationalism tends towards exclusion, patriotism is defensive while nationalism is aggressive, patriotism promotes democratic and egalitarian universalism while nationalism promotes imperial and divisive egoism. Yet both concurrently define America. Higonnet draws a portrait of America as a nation with a split personality syndrome which he refers to as a patriotic Mr. Jekyll and a nationalist Mr. Hyde, two alters that often suffer from amnesia concerning each other's existence (p. xxxvii). While the dichotomy may be found in all nations, it is heightened in America by a long-standing myth of exceptionalism. Viewing American history from this prism, Higonnet sees a patterned contest between the dichotomous forces of inclusive patriotism and exclusive nationalism, resulting in a perplexing mix of grand achievements and deplorable crimes.

Higonnet calls his book an "essay" rather than a chronological account of America's historical experience (p. xiix). In fact, it is both. It is a work of analysis and interpretation as well as a chronological survey of the course of the American national idea throughout American history. Higonnet makes his central analytical argument about the dichotomy in the introduction, and the rest of the book is devoted to applying his argument to familiar episodes from 1630 to 2006 without making any claim to new research or new discoveries.

Part 1 deals with the period 1630-1825. It begins with the Puritans who perceived themselves as God's agents of _good_, even as they waged a quasi-genocidal war against Native Americans, and it ends with a discussion of the rise of consensual republicanism based at once on libertarian inclusion and ethnic exclusion. Part 2 covers the period 1825-1912, a period of surging egalitarianism but also of abusive nationalism. It highlights the democratization of the national idea, with its apogee in the abolition of slavery, and its concurrent dark side in the institutionalization of racism, the near-elimination of Native Americans, and the wars of conquest against Mexico and Spain, which Higonnet describes as scandalous and lamentable.

Part 3 takes up the argument from 1912 to 2006. It shows how the revitalization of American universalism picked up again in the 20th century with the promise of a more inclusive social democracy (the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society and the Civil rights movement), but lost momentum and ended in inertia and retreat. In foreign policy, the period witnessed the idealistic universalism of Wilson but also the terrible decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, disastrous mistakes in Vietnam, a double standard in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and illegal interventionism in Iraq.

Two large but simplified pictures emerge from the book: one bright picture of great presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt who did their best to foster inclusion and egalitarianism, and one dark picture of bad presidents who fostered exclusionist policies. George W. Bush would be the epitome and culmination of the worst that America has to offer, the last in a list of criminal presidents that includes Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and John McKinley who perverted American ideals and used nationalism for exclusionist, racist and murderous policies. Higonnet pulls no punches in his denunciation of the dark side of American nationalism and uses provocative parallels such as "What Stalinism was to utopian communism, Bushism is to the American creed" (p. 288). His admittance that the book is "often critical" and "at times quite harsh" is an understatement (p. xiii). The book is passionate and will doubtless alienate some readers, but it would be myopic to ignore its message.

Higonnet's approach and analysis are not exactly new and will not come as a revelation for scholars familiar with American history in general and with studies of American nationalism in particular. The paradoxical dualities of America have been dealt with rather extensively with reference to themes or historical figures (Michael Kammen's _People of Paradox_, Edmund Morgan's _American Slavery-American Freedom_, to cite two famous examples). More recently, British journalist and policy analyst Anatol Lieven preceded Higonnet with a similar assessment of American nationalism. In _America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism_ (2004), Lieven contended that America kept "a splendid house but also demons in its cellar" and charged the "character of American nationalism" as "the most important reason" for U.S. failures in foreign affairs. Speaking of the Neoconservatives, Lieven also used the "Bolsheviks of the Right" analogy and quoted another British observer who denounced the American Enterprise Institute as "a kind of Cominform of the new world order" and Washington think-tanks as promoters of "a Stalinist-style dogmatism."[1]

Nor is this approach to American nationalism purely European and leftist. Both Higonnet and Lieven are treading in the footsteps of an illustrious American predecessor, Senator J. William Fulbright, who had reflected on American patriotism and nationalism at the height of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in his book _The Arrogance of Power_ (1966). According to Fulbright, two strands have always co-existed in American history, "a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant puritanism," and have engendered the mixed values of "moral patriotism" and "superpatriotism."[2] In order for America not to fail as a truly great power in the world Fulbright had cautioned that the first strand must remain dominant. But for asking his fellow countrymen to think critically about the national ethos in wartime, Fulbright had been vilified as unpatriotic by the superpatriots, just as Mark Twain had been vilified as unpatriotic for similar reasons at the end of the 19th century.

Higonnet's concerns echo those of Fulbright (and Lieven). Higonnet's critical assessment of the nature and history of American nationalism, like Fulbright's, is a morally-driven _cri de coeur_ for the future. Americans, he thinks, could and should avoid the politics of arrogance that have darkened their history since the beginning. As America becomes increasingly trans-national, and as the world becomes increasingly complex and dangerous, he considers it imperative that Americans adhere closer to their professed universalist ideals at home and abroad. His assessment is a serious stance that deserves serious attention.

Notes

[1]. Anatol Lieven, _America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism_ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1, 2, 4, 154.

[2]. J. William Fulbright, _The Arrogance of Power_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 250, 23, 20, 251.


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## archade (May 12, 2008)

James A. Tyner. The Business of War: Workers, Warriors, and Hostages in Occupied Iraq. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. viii + 152 pp. Bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-7546-4791-1. 

Reviewed for H-Levant by Christopher Parker, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Middle East and North Africa Research Group, Ghent University, Belgium 

What Kind of War Does Neoliberalism Make? 

In The Business of War, James A. Tyner provides an engaged and readable synthesis of scholarship and informed polemic produced in response to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. He situates this synthesis within a broader intellectual framework that draws on Michel Foucault, as well as on the work of geographers and ethnographers concerned with contemporary configurations of neoliberal globalism (e.g., David Harvey, Derek Gregory, Aiwha Ong, etc.). In line with the method suggested by these sources, Tyner begins by tracing the genealogy of assumptions invoked to naturalize the Bush administration's 
Iraq project--notably the sense of manifest destiny that has informed so much of America's engagement with the rest of the world over the past 200 years--and by sketching the broader history of corporate involvement in determining U.S. foreign policy interests (these being the subjects 
of chapter 2, "A War of Neoliberalism"). As Tyner notes, "we should not lose sight that economic ideologies--including but not limited to neoliberalism and neoconservatism--have greatly impacted the role and function of the military" (p. 16). 

But this book is ultimately motivated by a more profound sense of purpose. Tyner sets out to explore the nexus of neoliberalism and war by looking at how this intersection has inscribed itself on the bodies of migrant contract laborers held hostage in Iraq. In his own words: "My aim is to examine the political subjugation of hostages within Occupied Iraq as a means of articulating the de-humanization of neoliberalism and the business of war" (p. 4). This is a theme that Tyner appears to have stumbled across while on the heels of the Filipino migrant laborers who were the subject of his previous work. And it is one that is certainly worth exploring. Tyner sees the bodies of these hostages as emblematic of struggles to define the nature of the contemporary global system. 

Iraq clearly represents a new phase in "the business of war." Not only have the support functions of state-declared war been privatized to an extent previously unseen; close examination of the practices of private contractors in Iraq reveals the darker side of a world that has gradually been remade over the past three decades to make it amenable to neoliberal modalities of government. The role of the neoliberal model in Iraq's reconstruction is outlined in the first half of chapter 3, "The Business of Occupation." Tyner then calls attention to the contract laborers who have come from the slums of East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America to work for the private firms providing support services to the U.S. Army and other agencies involved in the reconstruction and government of Iraq. Tyner shows how this flow of migrant labor has of migrant labor has been made possible by new forms of cooperation between state agencies and a transnational private sector empowered by neoliberal reforms. He also shows that these invisible minions play a crucial role in making the human and financial costs of war acceptable to the U.S. public. Meanwhile, for militant groups, these migrants have--in Tyner's estimation--come to symbolize the militant neoliberal imperialism of the Anglo-American project in Iraq. 

Unfortunately, Tyner only begins the serious exploration of his central thesis midway into the fourth and penultimate chapter, "Spaces of Political Subjugation." Here, Tyner brings us to the plight of the hostages themselves by building on analysis of the Philippine government's position in advance of the Iraq war. Philippine authorities hoped, according to Tyner, that participation in the "coalition of the willing" would facilitate employment opportunities for Filipino laborers in the private-sector-led reconstruction effort. Tyner illustrates the consequences of such a policy by exploring the case of Angelo de la Cruz, a Filipino migrant laborer who was held hostage in Iraq for a relatively brief period in the summer of 2004. 

Tyner writes: "During de la Cruz's captivity, both the Philippine state, the Iraqi insurgents, and other participants attempted to inscribe their own discourses on to the captive body of de la Cruz. Although powerlessness [_sic_] himself, de la Cruz continued to be subjected to various interpretations and meanings; his body, in effect, continued to work, albeit for larger political purposes.… From the perspective of the captors, de la Cruz was not an individual [but represented] something else entirely … the Coalition [and] the abstract concepts of modernity and capitalism. This is made clear in the demands made by the abductors" (p. 122). 

But Tyner does not in fact provide any convincing evidence that resistance to such abstract concepts lay behind the demands of most hostage-takers in Iraq, and it strikes me as presumptuous to suggest that most Iraqi militants imagine themselves as foes of modernity or capitalism per se. Equally, his subsequent assertion--that "the bodies of workers and warriors, from the perspective of the abductors, are re-scripted as the personification of an illegal and unjustified occupation of their homeland" (p. 123)--seems somehow too easy a conclusion given the ambitious nature of this book. In trying to produce a meditation on the phenomenon of hostage-taking writ large--a political-philosophical polemic in the tradition of George Orwell and Slavoj Zizek (two authors whose inspiration Tyner acknowledges)--Tyner loses touch with local specificities. For example, he does not note that the overwhelming majority of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq have been truck drivers, suggesting that hostage-taking might--for most groups--be a tactic employed in struggles over the control of trade routes. Flying high in search of a profound interpretation, Tyner overlooks the mundane, if not always obvious, alternative. And it is perhaps in the mundane rather than the heroic that we might find and understand the most powerful (and even universal) motivations of the agents in the story. 

The Business of War clearly bears the strains of being Tyner's third book in as many years. The relatively large number of typographical errors suggests a lack of careful editing. Some of the literature that he reviews does not seem fully integrated into his argument; and Tyner's occasional reliance on a single source across significant passages of text reinforce the impression of a manuscript hurried to publication before the author had come to a fully digested synthesis. The force of Tyner's central argument is also weakened from the outset by his somewhat rushed (even slightly pedantic) discussions of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, globalization, transnationalism, and security. Given his promise to deliver "a political geographical polemic against the atrocities of a modern-day colonial war" (p. 2), Tyner might have found a more subtle way of integrating this background information into his account. Also, just when Tyner seems poised to take his argument in an interesting direction, he all too often falls back on the words of others, or on restatements of his main thesis that read somewhat like sloganeering. It is precisely because Tyner has an interesting and important argument to make that one would like to hear more of his own voice. Finally, as the critique in the previous paragraph suggests, Tyner would have done well to consult more of the specialist literature on Iraq, together with the available empirical studies of the occupation and the subsequent ongoing violence before meditating on the > motivations of insurgent hostage takers. 

Nevertheless, in spite of these critical remarks, the individual chapters of this book--and particularly chapter 3--make useful reading for both students and the informed public. Tyner's writing is readable and engaging. Most importantly, however, Tyner is to be commended for calling attention to the large-scale exploitation of migrant labor as a practice enabled by three decades of worldwide neoliberal "reform," and one that ultimately enabled the Bush administration to go to war thinking that the full political costs might be avoided. He is absolutely correct to argue that investigation of this practice will  likely offer insight into the nexus of neoliberalism and war, and to the darker side of neoliberal globalism more generally. This reviewer hopes  that Tyner will continue to follow through on the important themes addressed by The Business of War in his future research. 

In conclusion, I cannot help but wonder what this book might have been had Tyner pursued a different (albeit admittedly longer and more difficult) route in writing it. One could have told the story of how a nineteenth-century ideology of manifest destiny gave rise to twenty-first-century neoliberal militarism--a project that Tyner shows is underwritten by the labor of some of the world's poorest and most politically disempowered inhabitants--through a deep and sustained account of Angelo de la Cruz's personal and family history. What historical forces give rise to conditions that compel someone to travel halfway around the world to work for meager wages in a war zone? What arrangements make possible the linkages and pathways that enable such a journey? What did such a journey entail? And what does the imprisonment and decapitation that awaited some of these migrants upon reaching their destination say about the kind of war neoliberalism makes? As Walter Benjamin wrote: "Only when traveling along the road, can you say something about its force."[1] 

Note 

1]. Walter Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 352.


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## archade (May 12, 2008)

Reviewed by Joseph Alagha, Department of Humanities, Lebanese American University 

Hizbullah: The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon 

According to Augustus Richard Norton, his purpose for writing Hezbollah: A Short History is the presentation of an "honest" as well as "more balanced and nuanced account of this complex organization," which Norton calls "the leading Shi`i political party in Lebanon" (pp. 8, 186). While Norton's book offers no startling new insights, it provides a synopsis of what is known about Hizbullah in a form that is both compact and usually well written. 

Nevertheless, there are many shortcomings. First, in a book tailored to the nonspecialist reader, Norton has omitted a considerable number of historical events that are crucial to understanding subsequent Lebanese history. These include the seminal Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which carved the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands into today's contemporary states. Furthermore, there is no discussion of the Cairo Agreement and its annulment, which are critical to any understanding of the changing relationship between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanon's Shi`a.[1] 

In addition, Norton's transliterations of Arabic and Farsi terms are quite inconsistent, a fact that often results in distortions. Furthermore, some of Norton's transliterations are not simply unorthodox, but constitute serious errors. For example, Norton refers to Iran's Supreme Leader as the rakbar (p. 90). Irrespective of which transliteration system one employs, rahbar is always spelled with an "h," not a "k." 

And the errors do not end there. In a photograph appearing on page 64, Norton identifies the person in the foreground as Sayyid `Abbas al-Musawi. It is actually Shaykh Ragib Harb, Hizbullah's most influential resistance leader in the south, who was assassinated by Israeli forces on February 16, 1984, and to whom the Open Letter, Hizbullah's 1985 founding document, is primarily dedicated. Sayyid `Abbas al-Musawi was himself assassinated on Feb. 16, 1992 while returning from ceremonies marking the eighth anniversary of Shaykh Ragib's assassination. Anyone researching Hizbullah should know the difference between these two men. 
Such factual errors are distressingly frequent in Norton's book. For example, Imam Musa al-Sadr did not, as Norton implies, establish Harakat al-Mahrumin (the Movement of the Deprived) on his own (p. 19). Rather, al-Sadr joined with Greek Catholic Archbishop Grégoire Haddad in 1974 to found Harakat al-Mahrumin in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of Lebanon's poor regardless of their sectarian or ethnic affiliations. As such, the organization was initially open to persons from all sects. It was not until after the outbreak of the civil war that Harakat al-Mahrumin became a Shi`ite-based movement under the leadership of al-Sadr. Furthermore, the principal aim of al-Sadr's 1978 visit to Libya was not "to attend ceremonies commemorating the ascent of the Libyan leader" Muammar Qadhaffi to power (p. 21). In fact, al-Sadr's trip was motivated by a desire to end the Lebanese civil war. Having been informed that Qadhaffi was funding militias on both sides of the conflict, he planned to intercede with the Libyan leader to stop this practice. 

Norton's statements about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are also replete with errors. He asserts that "as of November 2006, at least 60 percent of all Lebanese [Shi`ites] follow Sistani, with the rest following Fadlallah. Very few consider themselves 'imitators' of Khamenei." (p. 151). It is worth noting that Khamene'i is the marja' al-taqlid (official source or authority of emulation) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Hizbullah's official marja', not marja'i, as Norton writes on page 100. On the same page, Norton states that Khamene'i "gave his blessings" to the party's participation in the Lebanese electoral process, thereby reducing the complexity, flexibility, and pragmatism of Shi`ite jurisprudence to individual whim. In point of fact, Hizbullah asked Khamene'i to provide a formal legal opinion (istifta') on the legitimacy of contesting the 1992 elections. As soon as Khamene'i authorized and supported (ajaza wa 'ayyada) participation, Hizbullah embarked on drafting its election program. 

Norton also fails to mention the national dialogue sessions that spanned the period between March and June of 2006. Given that the war broke out in July, it is no coincidence that the last two sessions (June 8th and 29th) were dedicated to the interrelated issues of Lebanon's defense strategy and the weaponry under Hizbullah's control. 

Norton's conclusion appears to serve as a postscript, as it reads like a chronology of events that occurred subsequently to those treated in the main text. Numerous errors are found here as well. First, Norton twice refers to General Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) as the "Free Political Movement" (pp. 153, 175). Norton's conclusions about the FPM are equally mistaken, asserting that " 'Aounists' and the Shi`a share a profound sense of victimization in what they see as a corrupt and unresponsive political system" (p. 153). Although the FPM and Hizbullah might share a sense of victimization and disgust with corruption, such factors are incidental. They are not central to the historic ten-point Understanding between the two groups, let aloneto an alliance based on mutual interest. A more plausible explanation is that the Christian nationalists (FPM) and the Muslim nationalists (Hizbullah) signed the aforementioned Understanding addressing relations with Syria and a variety of other political, economic, administrative, and security issues after the unrest of February 5, 2006 threatened to ignite a new civil war. 

Only in the final pages of his conclusion does Norton begin to offer some analytical insights, albeit far off the mark and contradictory. This applies to his insistence that "half-solutions and compromise usually prevail, just as they will likely prevail in the 2006 crisis" (pp. 157-158), as well as his forecast of the current political deadlock's resolution through "pragmatic compromises" (p. 159). It is difficult to reconcile this argument with Norton's contention that the FPM and Hizbullah are working "together to expand their share of power in significant measure at the expense of the Sunni Muslims" (p. 153). Norton's account of the crisis's unfolding is also in error: "Following the resignation of an allied Sunni member and in conjunction with the government resigned from the cabinet" (p. 156). The five Shi`ite ministers actually resigned first, on November 11, 2006, to be followed a few days later by environment minister Jacob Sarraf, who happens to be Greek Orthodox, not Sunni Muslim. Furthermore, Sarraf is an ally of former President Émile Lahoud, and thus only indirectly allied with Hizbullah. 

Finally, Norton's book sometimes reads more like a defense and justification, rather than a scholarly analysis, of Hizbullah's actions of terrorism, attributing these instead to Iran (p. 7. Norton also takes care in his conclusion to endorse Hizbullah's position on the July 2006 war, asserting that "it was utterly predictable that the Shi`a would emerge from the war as a mobilized, assertive, and more militant community" (p. 158). 

Despite its merits, Norton's Hezbollah: A Short History contains numerous errors of fact, interpretation, and attribution. A prominent scholar like Norton is expected to take more care with his text. And Princeton University Press clearly failed to exercise due diligence in the editing and peer review processes, thus failing both their author and their readers. Sadly, one can only assume that the topicality of this study's subject matter prompted a rush to publish, thus causing the imperatives of commerce to trump those of scholarship. 
Note 

[1]. The Cairo Agreement (CA) was signed on November 3, 1969 between Lebanon and the PLO granting the latter license to launch attacks from south Lebanon against Israel. The Lebanese parliament's annulment of the CA and all its corollaries were published in the Official Gazette on June 18, 1987 under law number 87/25.


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## archade (Jun 13, 2008)

Dale R. Herspring. The Kremlin and the High Command: Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. xix + 242 pp. Notes, index, ISBN 0-7006-1467-2.


Reviewed for H-War by Donald Wayne Wayson,Department of History, University of Texas at Arlington The Red Army in Transition The year 1991 marked the end of a Communist Soviet Union and the vaunted Red Army. What happened to this army, once regarded as one of the most powerful military forces on earth? In The Kremlin and the High Command, Dale R. Herspring, a political science professor at Kansas State University, seeks to answer that question as he explores the army's demise beginning with the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev through the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. This study is the first volume to cover the Russian military, and its 
failures, under their leadership. In this well-written and quite readable book, Herspring breaks new ground and provides a useful tool for anyone interested in the current state of the Russian military.


In seven chapters, Herspring presents handy introductions and great summaries of each leader, including a description of their respective leadership style, as it pertains to the military. Herspring also brilliantly details the main events in Russian military history. For example, he discusses the problems that Yeltsin faced in Chechnya and the manner in which he backed out of responsibility for the debacle. He shows that generals received the blame for the failure in Chechnya since Yeltsin did nothing to deflect criticism from them. As Herspring writes, "Instead of praising the military for its sacrifices in fighting the war in Chechnya, Yeltsin criticized it sharply" (p. 104). Herspring is also quite critical of how both Yeltsin and Gorbachev handled the transition from a Communist state to the current "democratic" state of Russia. Since a transition of this magnitude had never been attempted, Gorbachev faced the greatest difficulties. Due to a struggling economy, the Soviet military and its budget had to be cut; and it was Gorbachev's job to inform the military of these cuts. Not surprisingly, this task was not easy and the military obviously did not take well to these changes. This was an organization that had been fully funded under Soviet rule and was inexperienced in 
seeking additional funds or facing the prospect of cuts. Herspring examines perestroika and glasnost and their effects on the military. Gorbachev introduced demokratizatsiya in which "subordinates would not be afraid to criticize the actions of superiors" (p. 35). Once again, this was a shift that the military could not easily understand; in the Soviet past, when an order was given, subordinates followed it without question and surely did not question it publicly. Under perestroika, this questioning became the backbone of the new military, and under glasnost, Gorbachev made all 
information available to the public. The military, and its high command, was forced to work under the public radar; programs were broadcast on television criticizing the high command and its leaders; and details were made public putting the high command under a microscope. This turn to glasnost was obviously a new manner of functioning for the military. Yeltsin and his relationship with the high command is a topic on which Herspring spends significant attention in the book. Yeltsin, according to the author, used the military in taking control of Russia by offering incentives to the high command with which he did not follow through. Yeltsin did whatever it took to keep generals on his side and "promise[d] them almost anything" (p. 65). He was also able to get military support against the Russian parliament by offering to raise salaries, something he had difficulty achieving. The chapter on Putin is less extensive for obvious reasons. Most of his history is not yet written; several years may pass before we learn his true impact on the military. After the confusion left by Yeltsin and a leadership that felt burned by its leader, Putin's goal, Herspring writes, was to "reintroduce stability and predictability into the military" (p. 155). While Putin had his low moments (the sinking of the submarine Kursk and the Beslan school  incident, for example), he was able to centralize the power of the president and accept accountability for failures instead of blaming the military. Herspring believes, as his sources also show, that Putin was a much better leader than Gorbachev or Yeltsin, because he "introduced a sense of order and predictability" to the office (p. 192). 

Herspring's use of Russian sources is well conceived. He utilizes a wide variety of sources for this historic volume. The author admits that he does not fully agree with all of his sources, but does not shy away from inserting them in his book. He combines the sources relating to the three different leaders masterfully and gives readers one complete volume on the Russian military. Herspring pursues his thesis by answering questions concerning each of the three leaders by asking "what kind of leadership does the president exhibit and how is it perceived by the military" (p. 16). Herspring also does a great job of comparing the Russian army to armies of the Western world and the current army to that of the former Soviet army. The conclusion includes a synopsis of each leader and his role with regard to the military. Herspring details the troubles that the Russian military currently faces and summarizes how the military has reformed itself under the leadership of these three men. He maintains that the military under Soviet regimes was accustomed to direction from its leaders. Under Yeltsin and Gorbachev, it was asked to play a more directly political role, and now is returning to its comfort zone under Putin, a leader who provides explicit > directions to the military. Herspring is less critical of the presidency of Putin, as compared to Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but, in his defense, the military leadership did not care for Yeltsin or Gorbachev and the Russian military is in much better shape under Putin than it was under his two predecessors. In any event, as Herspring points out, whether the generals "like" Putin (or any other president) is not relevant to his study. He set out to determine which of the three leadership styles worked, if any, and where the Russian military would proceed. It is obvious to Herspring, as it will be to the reader as well, that Putin's conservative, straightforward approach better serves the Russian military.


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## archade (Jun 13, 2008)

Peter Sluglett. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 318 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4. 

Reviewed for H-Albion by Priya Satia, Department of History, Stanford University  


Lessons in Imperialism from Iraq's Past 

The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq's history. As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue of his thirty-year-old classic, Britain in Iraq, his happiness about the book's new lease of life is severely undercut by his awareness of its unhappy cause. (One at once anticipates and dreads a similar resurrection of long-neglected works on Iranian history in the near future.) While the continued obscurity of important historical texts underscores the ignorance guiding the prosecution of American war and diplomacy in the Middle East, the irony lies as much in the pedagogue's self-defeatist awareness that if only such books had been read in the halls of power earlier, they would have remained neatly irrelevant to our wider political life. 

That said, the timely reissue of Sluglett's book is an opportunity to comment on scholarship as much as politics, and that is, happily, a notably less pathetic story. Sluglett's original 1976 edition has long been the definitive text on the period of the British mandate in Iraq, from World War I to 1932. Initially published by the Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College in Oxford, the book provides the most complete and meticulous narrative of the formation of mandate policy in the tight space framed by British imperial interests and the political survival of its local collaborators, the Baghdadi political clique centered on King Faysal. The book offers "an assessment of Anglo-Iraqi relations and of Britain's role in Iraqi affairs during the period of the British occupation and mandate" with a view to making sense of "developments in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iraq" (p. xv). It provides an engaging and lucid portrait of the complex negotiations, politics, and imperial bureaucracy at the heart of the story. The diplomatic and domestic political pressures on local officials, their supervisors, the multiple imperial centers--Sluglett keeps all the pieces in play. The ad hoc and contingent nature of this chapter of imperial history is pressed home, with the light touch of a humane and wise chronicler. Sluglett presents with clarity and patience the intricacies of the entangled questions of oil, borders, and state finances. Five chronological chapters detailing the evolution of mandate policy are followed by three thematically focused chapters on land policy, defense, and education. Appendices on Shi'i politics and tenurial arrangements in the single province of Amara provide further close grain. 

Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development. 

In 2007, however, the very coupling of the "interdependence" analytical framework with the book's anticolonial politics produces a peculiar schizophrenia: the crescendoing pathos of the theme of concealed imperial power at times sits awkwardly with a framework that implies a moral equivalence between the British and the Iraqi ruling cliques. It is a framework that tends to sweep as much history under the musty carpet of high politics as it airs in the fresh light of 1970s radicalism. What emerges is a picture of a venal, opportunistic cabal of Iraqi politicians challenging the entirely natural presumptions of the British imperial state. Take the depiction of King Faysal's position: early on, Sluglett explains that Faysal's problem was that he was dependent on Britain but had to "appear to oppose the most demeaning aspects of British control" (p. 42). However, this summarizing statement writes out a score of facts revealed on subsequent pages detailing Faysal's actual, and not merely politically calculated, criticism of British rule; his enduring confusion about the extent of his liberty; and his repeated efforts to interfere with what he increasingly recognized as British imperial designs on his adopted country. In other words, in many instances, he really did resist British demands and was not merely "forced ... into the position of having to seem to resist British demands" (p. 49). The interdependence argument makes the Iraqi government and British state appear equal partners in an illusion perpetrated on the rest of Iraq, while the facts of Sluglett's story suggest that the Iraqi government played politics with considerably greater faith than its British counterparts: when asked to visit Europe in 1927, Faysal assumed he was being summoned to finally receive the gift of full independence, but, in fact, the invitation was merely a ploy to get him out of Baghdad and arrest his interference with British objectives. A measure of the stress under which this inchoate monarchy was struggling is provided by the 1929 suicide of Prime Minister 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Sa'dun, gesturing at a decidedly more sinister politics of empire than "interdependence" can allow. 

If, as Sluglett explains, Britain was obstinate about safeguarding its interests and the Iraqi government equally persistent about obtaining "'true' independence" (pp. 108, 119), these are certainly not ethically equivalent objectives. To admit as much is not to excuse the many crimes and failures of the Iraqi government but to attempt to better understand the kind of political context in which such failed, failing, or doomed-to-fail colonial and postcolonial states evolve. Stubbornness, however unproductive, can be admirable in some circumstances and indefensible in others. If the British were bent on preserving their imperial air route, oil fields, Royal Air Force training ground, prestige, and investments, there is surely cause to consider the legitimacy of this objective vis-á-vis the Iraqi government's foolhardy attempts to appear independent of the empire that had created it and foster a real sense of "national solidarity" (pp. 63-64). It was not the Iraqi government's idiosyncratic "weaknesses" that caused it to fail but its very nature as the spawn of indirect rule (p. 64). In short, there is analytical room here for considering structural causes--collaboration, indirect rule, anticolonialism--rather than pointing at individual Iraqi politicians' taste for acquiring land and tax exemptions. (If anything, the British government's imposition of iniquitous and extractive financial obligations on Iraq, here painted as the "natural" pursuit of interests [p. 160], merits even greater condemnation on the counts of greed and venality.) The book's analysis of minority and defense policy, in particular, is marred by finger-pointing at an Iraqi government that seems frequently to be elided with the machinery of the Iraqi state, which it neither created nor controlled. In the end, if most Iraqis were losers, as Sluglett sympathetically concludes, the blame for their massive suffering surely does not lie equally on the shoulders of the ruling clique and the British; the one may have struggled vainly against leviathan, but the other was leviathan. 

The book's organization tends to amplify the political dissonance produced by its analytical framework. In the blow-by-blow account of mandate policy in the first five chapters, the Iraqi position, like the British, is represented as a product of the naked calculation of political interest; but the brutality, exploitation, and injustices revealed in the final three thematic chapters on revenue policy, security, and education belie such evenhandedness. For instance, early references to the Iraqi government's revenue liabilities are cast in an entirely different light in the later chapters' depiction of the oppressive tax regime and violent methods of collection put in place by the British--although here, too, Sluglett emphasizes that this ugly end was the unintended consequence of misguided British policy rather than the inevitable result of destructive processes deliberately set in motion by a self-interested imperial state; if anyone was culpable, it was, again, the Iraqi government. Part of the problem lies in the obscurity of the moment in which those processes were put in > motion--the wartime occupation. Although the book purports to start in 1914, the conquest of Iraq receives short shrift. But, in fact, the exacting taxation system, the ecological changes wrought by "development" of the river system, and the violent postwar rebellion (which barely appears until p. 147) were all shaped by the exigencies of war. A more defined portrait of that era might have helped readers, and Sluglett, make better sense of Iraqi attitudes toward the British presence. Indeed, it is only in one brief moment near the end of the chronological account that Sluglett mentions British fears of tribal rebellion dating from the 1920 experience as a guiding principle in policymaking, but, in fact, that fear is central to understanding the history of the entire decade. 

In the end, from the supposedly objective analysis of interdependent political interests emerges a portrait skewed in a surprising direction for a book so clearly anticolonial in its political commitments: the sins of the British state are the sins of omission and unintended consequences; the sins of the Iraqi government are ... sins. The trouble is that the book's politics are at odds with its traditional methodology. This failing was not only understandable in 1976 but imparted an avant-garde feel to the entire enterprise, as did the old rough-hewn typeface. But, in 2007, the uncritical use of British sources to represent Iraqi perceptions jars--especially when it is done with a view to making an argument about interdependence that might have been agreeable enough to some contemporary British officials. One wishes the revised text might have excised the traces of an era less sensitive to the constraints of working from an imperial archive (however sympathetic to colonial peoples), such as uncritical reproduction of British assessments of endemic "intertribal skirmishing," a people " 'naturally lawless and averse to paying taxes,'" and insincere Iraqi nationalism and Kurdish solidarity (pp. 152, 157). 

For 1976, Sluglett did more than his share, and his book remains the indispensable, finely grained account of policy in mandatory Iraq. He gestured at a new type of imperialism in the making in Iraq, one that traded formal and even indirect control for something more discreetly menacing and that dispensed with the civilizing mission just when that mission had reached its apotheosis as the legitimate task of international institutions like the League of Nations. While outlining the contours of this new type of empire and the circumstances that made it possible, he stopped short of naming it or identifying it as the unfolding of a particular historical process. But, what Sluglett does leave us with is an indelible impression of the contingent nature of much of what occurred in Iraq, and it is this that keeps his a deeply human story, despite its focus on policy. 

In the end, Britain in Iraq at once corrects the old tale of the altruistic mandate and exposes the limits of the genre of high political history, the methodological impasse it could not bridge as anticolonial politics began to leave their mark on the writing of history. A painstaking focus on policy tends to obscure the operation of power itself. Unveiling it requires a sense of the larger political context--the historical process at work--and an understanding of the evolution of state practice. All this tends to raise the broader question, Why has the history of the British Middle East focused so closely on the realm of high politics? Some of this is certainly the result of archival access and training. But, some of it is the product of the history itself: the hiving off of an exalted, elite realm of foreign policymaking in precisely the era that modern democracy came into its own and the Middle East became formally colonized by Europe.[1] In short, as the era of democratic nation-states came into its own, so too did a new style of imperialism that relied on the discreet diplomatic exchanges and collaboration of elites. To tell the > history of twentieth-century empires as a history of high politics is to remain locked within that history; it is time to step out and observe the cultural, economic, political, and social scaffolding of the seemingly equally cynical machinations of the diplomatic stratosphere.  

 Note 
[1]. For more on this, see my _Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Partha Chatterjee has recently made a similar argument with respect to twentieth-century imperialism in general in Partha Chatterjee, "The Black Hole of Empire" (presidential lecture, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, November 7, 2007).


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## car (Jun 13, 2008)

archade said:


> Peter Sluglett. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 318 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4.



*“I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is impossible. Faisal is playing the fool, if not the knave… At present, we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano.”*  --  _British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, 1922_


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## archade (Jun 16, 2008)

Alex Abella's "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND 
Corporation & the Rise of the American Empire" (Harcourt 2008) 

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Bucknell University. 

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Sociologist C. Wright Mills warned about the cancerous growth of the military-industrial complex, and the increased secrecy of the American government, which was controlled by a narrow group with intimate ties to the corporate sector. Journalist Alex Abella’s insightful new book Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, broadens Mills’ analysis, showing how defense intellectuals with the RAND (Research and Development) corporation played an integral role in pushing for the massive escalation of defense budgets during the Cold War, in part through the adoption of an apocalyptic view of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities and global ambitions. Many of the same intellectuals and their protégés would later influence the disastrous U.S. occupation and invasion of Iraq. They were guided by an ideology in which American culture was thought to represent the peak of modern civilization, and by a belief in rationale choice theory – or the notion that humans acted solely out of self-interest and that the hegemonic aspirations of nations could only be curtailed through force or the threat of it. 

Based on the author’s unique access to the RAND archives and interviews with key members, Abella traces the corporation’s fascinating history, which dovetails with America’s rise to global power after the Second World War. Based out of Santa Monica, California, RAND’s mandate was to conduct studies on military strategy and to assist government leaders in implementing national security policy. Its importance reflected the fundamentally undemocratic “cult of the expert,” which held that only those with access to privileged information and credentials could be allowed to shape public policy. Abella profiles several “star” intellectuals from the “Golden Age” of the 1950s, including Yale historian Bernard Brodie, who initiated a pioneering study of strategic bombing, which found it be relatively ineffective in crippling Hitler’s war machine, as well as futurologist Herman Kahn who endorsed the use of nuclear weapons to prevent the possibility of a Soviet attack. He also focuses attention on mathematician Albert Wohlstetter, who would become a mentor to neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. 


 

Like Kahn, Wohlstetter was hawkish and advocated that the United States be prepared to strike first to avert the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. He was also in favor of expanding American hegemony and power abroad and could not conceive of a downside. 

Writing with remarkable clarity, Abella skillfully dissects the world-view of the RAND leading lights, pointing to their paranoia about Soviet military capabilities and how their view of international relations in strict realist and power terms resulted in a callous attitude towards the human ramifications of military action. An infatuation with statistical quantifications and an overweening sense of national exceptionalism and virtue further blinded them from social realities in the Third World and led them to ignore injustices in American society. These tendencies reached a culmination with their support for the Vietnam War. Many RAND analysts had been appointed as consultants to the Kennedy administration and saw Vietnam as a laboratory for the implementation of new counter-insurgency strategies. Ironically, while designed to aid in ongoing pacification efforts, their studies of the “Vietcong” infrastructure determined that the revolutionary organization was deeply rooted in the countryside and representative of long-standing yearnings for national independence and social justice. This contradicted the official administrative view of “northern aggression” and led many young RAND employees, including Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg, to conclude that the war was neither winnable nor just. Ellsberg, who was being groomed for a top position, became so incensed that he smuggled the Pentagon Papers - the secretly commissioned study of the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam - out of RAND’s offices and leaked them to the New York Times. This helped to ignite the antiwar movement, which included a large number of veterans, and he remains persona non-grata in RAND’s offices to this very day. 

After the Vietnam debacle, there was a heavy turnover in personnel and RAND shifted its focus towards urban problems like poverty and crime, which were seemingly weakening American prestige overseas. The corporation continued to shape the policy agenda and pushed forward the Reagan revolution by promoting deregulation, privatization and lowered taxes. These policies accorded well with rationale choice theory, which emphasized that individual self-interest guided human behavior rather than a sense of collective responsibility, and that small government was needed to allow man’s natural instincts to flourish. During the 1990s, RAND would emerge as a bastion of neoconservatism. Many of its leading ideologues, from Zalmay Khalilzad to Paul Wolfowitz to Richard Perle, either worked there or were mentored by former faculty. They promoted the continued militarization of U.S. society, technological innovations in the Armed Forces and preemptive warfare to expand U.S. hegemony and control of vital oil and energy reserves in the Middle-East. Their failed crusade in Iraq epitomizes an ideological hubris and narrow-sightedness that was rooted in RAND’s foreign policy approach dating from the 1950s, although somewhat more extreme. To his credit, Abella does not place the RAND ideals in a vacuum, arguing at the end of his book that they reflected broader cultural beliefs. He writes: “It is the American people who have bought into the myth of rationale choice and closed their eyes and allowed morality to be divorced from government policy……If we look in the mirror, we will see that RAND is in every one of us.” Sad but true. 

On the whole, Abella has written an outstanding book on the history of the RAND Corporation and the flawed reasoning and “expert” analysis that has driven forward an imperialistic foreign policy since World War 

II. Through these last comments we can see that he avoids the easy trap of vilifying the defense intellectuals at RAND, who were merely a product of a specific time and place in history and their own culture. He sheds great insight, nevertheless, into the Byzantine world of U.S. national security policy and how a technocratic elite has helped to craft a foreign policy based on irrational fears, self-interest and a lack of human sensitivity and compassion. The consequences have been devastating for both America and the world.


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## archade (Jun 16, 2008)

Christopher Cradock and M.L.R. Smith. '"No fixed values': A reinterpretation of the Influence of the Theory of guerre révolutionnaire and the Battle of Algiers, 1956-1957". Journal of Cold War Studies 9:4 (Fall 2007): 68-105. Doi: 10.1162/jcws. 2007.9.4.68.

Reviewed by James McDougall, University of London Published by H-Diplo on 8 February 2008 

(c) 2008 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online 

Values', violence, and counter-insurgency
In August 1845, Marshal Soult, the French Minister for War, wrote indignantly to his-fellow officer and subordinate, Marshal Thomas- Robert Bugeaud, Duke of Isly and Governor of Algeria, to protest at disciplinary measures being applied in the army of Africa. Soldiers of a light infantry battalion had been subjected to a variety of punishments outside the provisions of army regulations, up to and including le clou au rouge - being suspended by a cord, with which hands and feet were tied behind the back, from a nail in the wall, until the eyes became bloodshot - and le clou au bleu, the same practice extended until the victim 'turned blue' from asphyxiation. 'Disciplinary' abuses of all kinds were of course not uncommon in nineteenth century armies. The French army in Africa, however, from shortly after the fall of Algiers in 1830, practised torture even on its own troops.1 The levels of violence inflicted on Algerians were correspondingly more severe, and unlike the cases that prompted Soult's intervention, they generally did not attract attention in the Parisian press. 

The systematic and routine use of torture by the French army in its counter-insurgency campaign during the Algerian war of independence little over a century later, however, did of course attract such attention, and as Cradock and Smith note in their article, aspects of the war, most emblematically the 'Battle of Algiers' of 1956-7, were 'controversial at the time and [have] remained the subject of often heated debate.' (68) The authors' claim to avoid taking a position in that debate, to move away from consideration of the war 'as only [sic] a "lived" experience' (71) and to reframe the French army's conduct more 'objectively' in terms of strategy and operational effectiveness without 'being unduly swayed either by the thinking of [the theorists of guerre révolutionnaire] or by the trauma of torture' (70, my emphasis), however, is not convincing. The article, written on the basis of published French sources and recent secondary literature, makes an argument which is neither new not very surprising, and in doing so their main objective appears to be a rather unsubtle 'assessment' (and vindication) of the effectiveness of torture in counter-insurgency. The argument-that 1950s theoretical writing on guerre révolutionnaire (counter-insurgency warfare) was not as influential as has sometimes been supposed in the conduct of the urban counter-guerilla campaign of 1956-7-will surprise only those whose notions of what happened in Algeria at the time depend on the abstractions of the kind of military history that considers things from the analysts' (or satellite's) -eye view rather from than the ground-level 'face of battle' where 'only' lived experience takes place. French military theorising on counter-insurgency (on the basis of experience in Vietnam) was to a considerable degree, and certainly as far as the practice of torture was concerned, no more relevant to the conduct of the war in Algeria than were equally elegant, but equally fantastic, theories of 'civilising mission' or 'assimilation' to the actual practices of colonial rule. Hence the first problem with Cradock and Smith's essay is that their ostensible opponent is a straw man, and a venerable one at that: their principle revision is to the work of George Kelly, published in 1965 2. 
The second is that they take rather a long time to knock him down: that the actual influences and considerations [determining French conduct] .... were somewhat more diffuse' (70) than the application of a body of ideological Cold War theorising, and notably that they hinged on 'the contingent historical experience of the French army' (105), from defeats in Vietnam and Suez to the horrific revolutionary and repressive violence of Algeria, is unsurprising and well established, but the authors don't really get around to addressing this question until p. 98, almost at the end of their article. 

What is surprising about this argument, if what is really intended is an analysis of the significance of a particular school of strategic theory on the practice of military operations, is that its focus is so badly chosen. Concentrating on Algiers rather than the war as a whole, on the urban rather than rural guerilla and counter-insurgency context, is bound to give a very distorted representation of this conflict. The war in Algeria was overwhelmingly fought in the countryside; the urban terror campaign and 'great repression' of 1956-7, however famous in film and literature, were very exceptional events in the prosecution > both of the FLN's war of independence and of the French war of colonial re-conquest. The central notion of counter-insurgency strategy, correctly identified by the authors as 'control of the population' (76)-in which surveillance, policing and intelligence gathering went along with construction and 'development', countering the nationalist project with demonstrations of the rewards of loyalism-are indeed > absent from the Battle of Algiers, which unfolded as an overwhelming and untrammelled exercise of brute force by the colonial state against a civilian population placed under siege, intimidated, imprisoned, tortured and summarily executed. In the rest of the country, on the other hand, the 'developmentalist' ideology of late imperialism, especially the investments and building projects of the Constantine plan, went hand-in-hand with the massive forced relocation and resettlement of the population, in which some 2 million people were herded into 'regroupment centres', some of which eventually resembled 'development villages', others remaining, in effect, concentration camps. The proliferation and 'weaponisation' of schools and clinics, the mobilisation of 'self-defence groups' and auxiliary army units, the campaigns of propaganda by itinerant film and loudspeaker companies, lectures and pamphlets on 'the future of French Algeria', might arguably be held to suggest that the theories of counter-insurgency were more significant in the war as a whole than the authors allow for the particular case of Algiers. Of course, the extremely obtuse and unsubtle attempts at indoctrination employed in this psychological warfare almost universally failed (contra the authors' assertion, again on the basis of their published French accounts, that 'it is impossible to gauge' (98) their success). Even many of those engaged, for their own particular reasons of security and circumstance in a context of social breakdown, upheaval and tragedy, 'on the French side' in French uniform, were aware by the late 1950s that the cause of independence had won the argument for the immense majority of the population.3 

Leaving aside the value and accuracy of the relativisation of guerre révolutionnaire for a moment, it should also be noted that this argument is made on some mistaken grounds, particularly when the authors become entangled in the question of the extent to which the theorists of counter-insurgency can be held responsible for the increasingly anti-republican and putschist tendencies of parts of the French officer corps in the later stages of the war. The failure to rally the support of much of the army, or even of many of those officers directly involved in the Battle of Algiers, behind the anti-Gaullist insurrection in 1961 appears to the authors to demonstrate the lack of real influence of counter-insurrectionary thinking (77-8, 103). What failed, though, was not counter-insurgency theory but an ideology of 'counter-revolution' with which the authors conflate it but that, whatever its Cold War anticommunist colouring of the moment, was in the context under discussion much more strongly tied to a far older, and specifically French, politics of reaction against the Republic as regime post-1789. It was the 'ultra' ideology that, among other things, sought to imprint 'the Sacred Heart on the tricolour' that lay behind much of the last-ditch violence to defend the empire and the honour of the army against the betrayal of the 'bitch-republic' and her soft, liberal and/or leftist politicians. The prevalence of this strain of militarist ideology among DOP (torture squad) personnel in Algiers is documented in Henri Alleg's account of his own torture in 19574, but there was never any reason to suppose that these men had been reading treatises on guerre révolutionnaire. 

In the same vein, some other errors of detail reveal a lack of attention to the specific case at hand: Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the historic founding leaders of the FLN, is mistakenly identified as the 'head of the MTLD', which itself is misidentified as 'a rival nationalist organisation to the FLN' (80-81) rather than its precursor. Yacef Saadi, military organiser of the FLN's Algiers 'autonomous zone' was never 'the head of the ALN', as he is presented on p.82. The location of the military staff of the 10th parachute division at Hydra, then an upscale European suburb (now the city's diplomatic district) is misinterpreted as 'implying that the paratroops' role lay in operations against rural guerillas' (85-6), a supposition that no-one in Algiers (or familiar with Algiers) could have made. The authors' over reliance on secondary English-language sources and French accounts such as Trinquier's (published in 1964) is perhaps partly responsible: more recent French (let alone Algerian) works, such as Gilbert Meynier's, are ignored. 

The authors are open about their concern with the 'French perspective' on their subject (71, n.12), but this lapses into their adoption, rather than analysis, of the French army's point of view. Indeed, the > 'values' of the authors overlap to a disturbing degree with those of their sources , and here we come to more serious problems in the unspoken suppositions underlying their presentation of evidence and the broader argument based on it. The article uncritically relies upon a distinction between 'terrorism', committed by the FLN, on one side, as against the 'anti-terrorist' actions of the paras who assumed police powers in Algiers during 1956-57, and 'counter-terrorism' (97) in self-defence by Europeans, on the other. There can be no basis other than that of ideological preference for such a distinction. In what respect was the bombing by the 'ultra' ORAF ('French Algeria Resistance Organisation'), in the casbah on 10 August 1956, which destroyed 4 houses in the rue de Thèbes and killed between 15 and 60-the most costly single incident in the 'Battle', but referred to by the authors only tangentially and with an erroneous date (97, n.108)-an act of 'counter'-terrorism, when no such massive, indiscriminate, timed bombing against civilians had yet been perpetrated by the FLN in the city? The (justly) 'notorious' (81) FLN bombings of the Cafetéria and Milk Bar in central Algiers on 30 September, largely a reprisal for the Rue de Thèbes, killed three. The soldiers so affected by the 'jarring impact of the sight of the murder and mutilation of [European] civilians' (100) by FLN atrocities that they felt torture to be necessary and justified apparently felt no such revulsion at the much more frequent sight of murdered and mutilated Algerians. Is the authors' distinction between terrorism' and 'counter-terrorism', then, merely one between the violence of the dominated population, who kill fewer people themselves but whose lives are worth less, and that of the dominant, who kill more people but whose lives are worth more? 

The notion that European violence was merely a response to that of the FLN is untenable at every level. The contention, made in their apologia by Generals Aussaresses and Massu, that the army's own systematic terrorising of the population averted a state of 'constant upheaval, as terrorist incidents provoked harsh counterterrorist measures' (97) is simply incredible. So is the authors' unquestioning acceptance of the argument, relied upon in the self-justifying memoirs that are their primary sources, that the army's actions in Algeria in general, and the systematic application of torture in Algiers in particular, were simply the only available 'antidote' (99) to a 'terror campaign [of the FLN/ALN] unprecedented in its scale and ferocity' (100). The wider background to the FLN's campaign of violence provides ample evidence of the conjoined efforts of European militia and regular army in the repression of Algerian nationalist risings, and of the relative scale of the violence inflicted by the former on the latter. The abortive insurrection and massive repression of May 1945 in eastern Algeria cost 103 European and several thousand5 Algerian lives, and the attempted levée en masse of the peasantry by the FLN near Phillippeville on 20 August 1955 took the lives of 71 European and 21 Algerian civilians as well as of 31 members of the security forces, before the repression killed between 1,273 (the official figure) and 12,000 Algerians. In May 1945, it was the sub-prefect of the town of Guelma, André Achiary, who armed and organised the militia; in 1956, he was the chief of the ORAF, the proto-OAS group responsible for the rue de Thèbes bombing. The army and paramilitaries would only turn against each other at the war's dénouement. The picture presented by Cradock and Smith, of Algerian terror and European 'counter-terror' mediated by the army as attempting to 're-establish order' by removing a 'minority of fanatics' from an otherwise peaceful populace, is a gross and wilful misreading of the historical record. The underlying assumption, that massive violence inflicted by a dominant population and its state apparatus against a subject population is 'legitimate', whereas violence (inevitably of a lesser order of magnitude, however atrocious in every particular instance) inflicted upon the former by the latter, is illegitimate, is at the very least ethically dubious, however lawyerly; at any event it is useless as a basis of historical analysis. It blinds the authors of this article to all the harsh complexities of the conflict they seek to apprehend from on high, and consequently fail to understand at all. 

 Here we come to the crux of the matter: can we really believe, as the authors assert, that the effect of the army's conduct in Algiers was in fact to 're-establish order' (97)? While the role of counter- insurgency theory in the French 'victory' in Algiers is downplayed by the authors (102), the supposition that this was, in fact, a victory, won by unconventional but apparently necessary means, is not questioned. 'The effectiveness of torture in producing information', they assert, 'is not in doubt' (104), and indeed it is unsurprising, when between a third and a half of the male population of the casbah had been rounded up and interrogated, that it should ultimately have been possible for the French to dismantle much of the FLN's urban guerilla network. But both the statement and the assumption behind it-that the aim of torture really was to produce information, that it was a means of last-resort unwillingly applied in extraordinary circumstances and only to 'save innocent lives'-rest on very dubious foundations. As to the reliability of the information obtained under torture, and indeed the accuracy of the information that was sought, the well-known case of Djamila Boupacha, an FLN liaison agent who confessed under torture to harbouring FLN fighters but who was further tortured (culminating in her rape with a bottleneck) until she signed a false confession to a bombing in which she had played no part, but of which the French authorities attempted to convict her, is an exemplary illustration of the abuse, even within its own perverse bounds of acceptability, of the uses to which 'interrogatoire poussé' was pushed. Her case became famous because of the account6 her lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, wrote at the time and published with the support of Simone de Beauvoir, but it can hardly have been exceptional in any other respect. As for the real purposes of torture, as recent scholarship on the subject has abundantly demonstrated7, its systematic and longstanding practice in Algeria belies the arguments of expedient 'necessity' advanced by its practitioners during the Battle, and largely accepted by Cradock and Smith. As the authors duly point out, torture was in routine use by the French police in Algeria before the beginning of the FLN's insurrection in 1954, but the point is taken in their argument only to illustrate the existence of an influence on the army's conduct preceding that of counter-insurgency theory. What it more significantly points to, however, is the routinised terrorism to which the Algerian population had long been subjected by the apparatus of the French colonial state. Torture, as debate at the time and much scholarship since has shown, was never a specifically targeted means of extracting specific 'actionable' information for the prevention of particular terrorist outrages: it was a generalised demonstration, to which anyone might be subjected, of the absolute power which the forces of the 'maintenance of order' held over the lives of a subject population (and their sympathisers). The aim of Commandant Aussaresses and his henchmen in the Battle of Algiers was certainly to 'break' the FLN, by whatever means available, but in no respect did this mean protecting a majority civilian population for whom the established order was legitimate from a few fanatical terrorists seeking to subvert it. The army's resort to the massive, indiscriminate and singularly untargeted terror that was unleashed against the civilians of Algiers en masse was merely the final culmination of the overt violence, in various forms, on which the colonial 'order' had always rested, and which, as Marshal Soult had discovered in 1845, had already then led to institutionalised abuses within the ranks of the military that indicated (well before the traumatic defeats of 1870, 1940, and 1954) that all was not well with the honour, or the self-respect, of the army. The Algiers casbah was indeed 'gripped by terror' (102) in 1956-57, but it was not that of the FLN. The 'Battle of Algiers' was not only not 'a triumph of guerre révolutionnaire'; it was no triumph at all, but a self-inflicted strategic defeat for the French in Algeria, one that revealed not only the moral bankruptcy of the colonial system and of the apparatus of extreme and illegal coercion that alone could uphold it, but the extent to which it was strictly impossible to 'win' a counter-insurgency war that depended, as its theorists observed, on 'the unconditional support of the population'. When the entire population became the enemy to be suspected, corralled, searched, checked, intimidated, imprisoned, tortured, murdered in secret and dumped at sea, how could it not be apparent that the war was already lost? 

James McDougall 
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 


Notes 

1 The correspondence is to be found in the French military archives: Service historique de la défense, Chateau de Vincennes, 1M/1996/21. 

2 George A. Kelly, Lost Soldiers: the French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1945-1962 (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1965). 

  3 See, for example, the oral history testimonies of former harkis (Algerian auxiliaries in French uniform) collected by Gregor Mathias, held at the audiovisual archive of the Maison méditerrannéenne des sciences de l'homme, Aix-en-Provence. 

4 Henri Alleg, La Question (Paris, Minuit, 1961), 36. 

5 The figure is impossible to ascertain; certainly more than the civil authorities' official 1500, certainly fewer than the nationalists' claimed 45,000. 

6 Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha (Paris, Gallimard, 1962). 

7 See the chapter by Raphaëlle Branche in Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora (eds), La guerre d'Algérie, 1954-2004: La fin de l'amnésie? (Paris, Laffont, 2004).


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## archade (Jun 27, 2008)

Andrew J. Heubner. The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture  from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. x + 371 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography.

by Susan J. Matt, Department of History, Weber State University 

 Popular Portrayal of American Soldiers 

In The Warrior Image, Andrew J. Huebner offers a new perspective on American attitudes towards war in the twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that Americans saw World War II as the paradigmatic "good war," and only became cynical about war as a result of Vietnam. Huebner's book suggests otherwise. 

By examining movies, novels, photo exhibits, and print journalism, Huebner demonstrates that representations of soldiers began to change over the course of World War II. In the early years of the war, the imagery of soldiers and warfare was fairly celebratory. It conveyed the message that while soldiers might suffer hardships, these would ultimately make them better citizens. Soldiers were > ennobled by their participation in a cause larger than themselves, and while they might be transformed by the effort, such transformations would be positive. 

Gradually, less sanitized portrayals of army life surfaced in the media,  particularly in the works of Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin. Both men came to portray World War II soldiers as victims of uncaring officers and of larger bureaucratic and geopolitical forces. By the end of the war, social scientists of various stripes also began to express concern about the process of reintegrating soldiers into civilian life, and  suggested that there might be a host of readjustment issues, ranging from psychological distress to housing shortages. Such concerns were reinforced by more ambiguous portrayals of the war and its aftermath in  the media, and in novels such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the  Dead (1948). 


The Korean War further complicated American attitudes towards war. Over the course of the conflict, newspapers and magazines offered "increasingly skeptical reporting" (p. 100), and printed vivid photos of the hardships soldiers faced and the wounds they incurred. Mainstream publications like Life and Newsweek challenged traditional notions of bravery when they published photos of soldiers crying, and, consequently, Huebner maintains, by the end of the Korean conflict, martial imagery had changed substantially. While during World War II, reporters, writers, moviemakers, and photographers had celebrated the "stoic citizen-soldier" who was "part of a vast, democratic effort" and  who epitomized masculinity, by the end of the Korean War, journalists portrayed soldiers as experiencing a "greater degree of discouragement, sorrow, agony, and fear," and thereby "widened the definition of the  masculine, American fighter" (p. 130). Rather than play down the suffering of soldiers, the media often emphasized it. 

Journalists, novelists, and filmmakers also injected new realism into their depictions of G.I.s, showing them as isolated--from home, each other, and human values--and functioning in antagonistic relationships with their commanding officers. Already visible in the film and print culture of the 1950s was a sense of disenchantment with the Cold War, anxiety about the military industrial complex, concern about the effects of warfare on individuals, and fear of future--possibly nuclear--conflicts. 

Vietnam, then, did not create a wholly new national perspective on war, so much as it sharpened and magnified existing viewpoints. Overall, coverage was less sanitized than in previous conflicts, but many of the topics journalists wrote about had been of concern and interest to their predecessors for the last two decades. Particularly interesting is Huebner's treatment of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW), and their various publicity campaigns and events. He shows how they worked not only to end the war but to demonstrate how the Vietnam conflict victimized soldiers. Responses to the trial of William Calley for the My Lai massacre likewise emphasized the idea that war brutalized men, and damaged them. According to this perspective, Calley and other soldiers  like him were not merely perpetrators. They too were victims victims of government, authority, and flawed foreign policy, which had wreaked havoc on their lives and psyches. Huebner also provides an analysis of the movies and television programs of the era, from _M*A*S*H_  (1972-83) to _The Deer Hunter_ (1978), and shows how a deep sense of disillusionment with government, warfare, and military brass rather quickly permeated mass culture. 

 Huebner makes a compelling argument that the images of soldiers as victims and war as brutalizing, and the cynicism which undergirded such images, did not emerge with Vietnam. They first appeared during the final months of World War II, and gained traction over the course of the Cold War. The Warrior Image provides a rich discussion of how these images circulated in books, articles, movies, and novels. It makes an intriguing point that as disillusionment with war and government increased, so too did sympathy for soldiers. To that extent, it shows some of the effects that this imagery had on the population at large. What is missing is an in-depth discussion of how soldiers themselves received and reacted to these portrayals of warfare. Did such portrayals affect their sense of identity? Did soldiers alter their conduct and attitudes in the face of such images? If Huebner could show how the changing representations of solidering affected everyday Americans, and in particular, G.I.s, he would be able to demonstrate the larger social consequences of the transformation that he so carefully charts. That said, The Warrior Image is a fascinating book--meticulously researched, extremely well written, and important because it successfully challenges conventional narratives about the meaning of war in the twentieth century. In tracing the evolution of martial imagery in popular culture, Andrew Huebner has made an important contribution to both cultural and military history.


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## archade (Jul 6, 2008)

Robert M. Citino. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942_. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xiv + 429 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978 070061531-5. 

Reviewed for H German by Stephen G. Fritz, Department of History, East Tennessee State University 

Defeat through Victory 

Continuing his examination of the German way of war, Robert Citino has produced a cogently argued, clearly written book in which he asserts that the German defeat in World War II was as much conceptual as it was material. Given its geographical position and limited resource base, according to Citino, first Prussian, then German leaders learned that in order to survive a world of hostile enemies, wars had to be short, sharp, and decisive. Consequently, German military doctrine placed great emphasis on operational factors, to the detriment of prosaic material and logistical considerations. German planners thus concentrated their efforts on designing elegant operational schemes to achieve victory, while their opposite numbers in the enemy states tediously mobilized economic resources. As a result, Germany found itself dangerously dependent on maneuver for success, since it consistently lacked the firepower and material resources necessary for decisive victory. When it worked, as in 1870-71, the triumph was glittering and spectacular; when it failed, as in 1941-42, the defeat was total and ruinous. It seemed for Germany that war was always all or nothing; its dependence on operational doctrine left it little room for any alternative outcome. 

 After a short introduction in which he deftly summarizes Prussian German military doctrine, Citino makes it clear that, based on its history, the operational situation facing German leaders after 1941was neither unique nor particularly worrisome. The fact that Germany found itself surrounded by enemies that substantially outnumbered it and had access to vastly greater economic resources was nothing new in German military history. Indeed, graduates of the Kriegsakademie knew what to do, since precisely this scenario formed the basis of their operational studies. The lesson of German history screamed one thing: attack and land a crushing blow against a single opponent to shatter the enemy coalition. Citino asserts that the weakness of this approach had already manifested itself by the end of 1941. Given their emphasis on operational concerns, German military planners were in a sort of conceptual prison, one in which they thought very little about strategic concerns, but focused almost exclusively on operational victories. The weakness of this approach lay in the lack of any exit strategy. If maneuver and a war of movement failed to yield a quick strategic victory, the only option left to German leaders seemed to be more of the same: keep winning operational triumphs in the hope that they would eventually lead to overall success. Therefore, as Citino notes wryly, by 1941, "the Wehrmacht ... had conquered itself into a strategic impasse" (pp. 33-34). 

Just as significantly, these dazzling successes of 1939-41, whether in Poland, Scandinavia, France, or the Balkans, while not achieving any decisive results, had left the Wehrmacht dangerously overextended. Much to German dismay, the pattern established in the first two years of the war held fast in the second half of 1941. Once again, the Germans won brilliant battles of maneuver and encirclement but to no avail; the Soviets stubbornly refused to give up. More ominously, although they lent themselves to spectacular headlines and brilliant weekly newsreels, these encirclement battles proved to be grinding, grueling, costly affairs that began the process of gutting the Wehrmacht. As Citino points out, "[t]he Wehrmacht's losses in men and material, even in victory, were far heavier than they had been in previous campaigns" (p. 42). Indeed, one might note that the German army actually suffered more combat deaths in July 1941 than in the crisis months of December 1941 or January-February 1942. For a military organization not keen on logistics or economic mobilization under the best of circumstances, these losses proved beyond capacity for replacement. From the summer of 1941, the German army consistently ran short on crucial supplies necessary to sustain an all-out war effort. 
Although the grim, dogged Soviet resistance was primarily responsible for preventing the Germans from converting operational triumphs into decisive victory, another problem had emerged that would plague the Germans in 1942: a lack of clear focus on the major strategic goals of the Barbarossa campaign. For a country that lacked sufficient resources in the first place, the failure to prioritize key aims on the Eastern Front risked a serious dispersal of effort that could only undermine the larger goal of a quick victory. In a further bitter twist, the conflict between Adolf Hitler and his military leaders put another cherished 
German military tradition into question: the independence of army commanders in the field. Although the Germans survived the Soviet counterattack before Moscow and the savage winter of 1941-42, the experience both reinforced and undermined key German ideas on how to make war. 

As German leaders pondered the military situation in the early spring of 1942, Citino raises one of the most puzzling questions of World War II: given the fact that their armies occupied much of Europe, why did the Germans fail to mobilize resources on a scale similar to their enemies? Unfortunately, although he poses the question, Citino doesn't provide any answers. This omission does not so much point to a failure on his part as illustrate a limitation inherent in operational military history: the focus must remain on the battlefield. And here, Citino once again proves adept in his analysis of operational factors. Although the German gaze remained squarely on the Soviet Union, at this point Citino shifts the strategic focus of his book to the desert war in North Africa. Admittedly a side show in terms of sheer numbers, the North African campaign nonetheless confronted the Germans with the troubling reminder that although they barely had strength enough to fight in one theater at a time, they now faced the reality of having to conduct operations simultaneously in a number of far-flung areas. This dispersal of energies, in turn, presented problems of both a command and logistical nature. In North Africa, of course, Erwin Rommel invoked the traditional independence of the field commander to violate orders on a consistent basis. Even as he was embarrassing his opponents with his operational and tactical brilliance, however, he lacked sufficient logistical support to achieve anything like a decisive strategic victory. In a reprise of the Russian campaign of 1941, every German victory in North Africa simply led to a strategic impasse that the Germans could not resolve. 

In similar fashion, when faced with the dilemma of what to do in Russia after the blitzkrieg had failed, German planners came to the only conclusion possible given their history, training, and assumptions: launch another blitzkrieg campaign. In arriving at this decision, army leaders reinforced their tradition. As Citino also notes, though, in terms of the operational plan for 1942 they departed significantly from tradition and past practices: it was to be an exceedingly complex operation based on a series of sequential actions directed from the top with little decision-making freedom accorded field commanders. Success was assured only if the enemy cooperated once again in his destruction. The plan, Operation Blue, began to fall apart almost immediately, a consequence of both German and Soviet actions. Here, the experience of 1941 proved significant. Determined to avoid the operational chaos of the latter stages of the 1941 campaign and faced with insufficient economic and military resources (shortages in the Luftwaffe proved especially limiting), German planners now aimed not to pull off deep battles of encirclement, but instead to rely on Soviet forces staying in place and conduct a rolling series of shallow encirclements. In the event, whether from sheer panic or because of a Soviet decision to withdraw into the vast expanse of southern Russia, the initial German thrusts in the summer of 1942, while conquering much territory, netted few prisoners. The Wehrmacht found itself punching air. Rather than striking in depth to the east and trapping large Soviet formations against the natural line of the Volga, the Germans found themselves sliding ineffectually to the south in an operation that stretched their supply lines to the breaking point. Almost from the beginning, the Soviet retreat threatened to render the operational plan for 1942 pointless. 
This operational problem concealed a larger dilemma. Hitler's goal for the war against the Soviet Union had always been the annexation of Lebensraum, but how was it to be achieved? The Germans barely had the resources to conquer European Russia, let alone the entire Soviet Union. Now that the Red Army had learned not to let itself be trapped in encirclement battles, destruction of the enemy forces proved beyond German capabilities. As the situation in North Africa demonstrated, the USSR's western allies were steadily amassing economic and military resources for use against Germany. For their part, the Germans found themselves increasingly dependent on their allies, Italy, Rumania, and Hungary, nations that could marshal far few resources than those of > the western allies. Hitler further compounded this increasingly unfavorable situation with his impatience and impetuosity: splitting the already over-stretched German forces, demanding that they conduct operations simultaneously that had been planned sequentially, and ignoring the threatening situation on the exposed German flanks. Once again, the Germans confronted their basic dilemma, how to do more with less. As Citino stresses repeatedly, the Germans had enough strength to win on the operational level, but failed to translate these gains this into strategic victory. This quandary simply grew with increasing German success on the battlefield, as scarce resources had to be dispensed over a wider area. To Citno, this conundrum reflects the basic German way of war itself, a conceptual framework based on historical experience that, limited in its focus to operational details, by definition could not devise an alternative approach if operational success failed to bring a swift strategic victory. 

Viewed from the present perspective, in light of our awareness of the chronic German deficiencies of men and material, the outcome seems almost inevitable: the turning points at Stalingrad and El Alamein, then the grinding down of German resistance over the next three years. Citino resists that temptation, instead soberly reminding us that "the most shocking aspect of 1942 ... is how absurdly close the Wehrmacht came to taking not one but all of its objectives for 1942" (p. 306). Citino is correct in this judgment, and he both affirms and raises some questions about his thesis. As Richard Overy has demonstrated, the outcome of World War II hinged on the cumulative effect of narrow victories in a few key areas that eventually produced an overwhelming allied triumph. Once of these key areas was economic mobilization, where the Germans failed to convert the resources of occupied Europe into sufficient military strength. Did this failure occur because, as Citino would argue, the German leadership simply did not concern itself with non-military factors, being focused exclusively on operational matters and thus blind to the obvious flaws in their method? Or, as others might argue, was it the result of the chronic institutional Darwinism and inefficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy, the racist and exploitative nature of the German occupation, the burdens produced by trying simultaneously to fight a military war and a war against the Jews, or simply the ultimately limitless aims of Hitler?  
As with all good interpretative histories, Citino forces the reader to think about his assertions. Was the German failure in Russia in 1941 the result of an exclusive emphasis on operational thinking, or a consequence of a poor operational plan, one with no clearly defined focus upon which the Germans could concentrate resources? How great a role did key operational decisions play in the German defeats of 1941 and 1942? Did the Germans over-extend themselves before Moscow in 1941 because of blind operational thinking or because of recent historical memories (the Marne in September 1914) of a strategic victory thrown away because of a failure of effort at the last minute? As Citino notes of German actions in Russia in 1942, "the operational plans for the summer offensive were in many ways a departure from past military practice" (p. 157). Indeed, in terms of preparation and assembly of forces, Operation Blue marked, according to Citino, "a remarkable break with the past" (p. 158). Does this information suggest, then, that the Germans might have been successful if they had maintained their operational traditions? Or, was the departure from customary practice itself the result of the failure of operational thinking? German commanders' loss of decision-making autonomy in the field also constituted a key sub-theme of 1942, and again represented a significant departure from German war-making custom. With less interference from above and more freedom on the ground, could the defeat of 1942 been turned into an operational victory? 

Robert Citino has produced an outstanding work of operational military history, a book that combines exhaustive research with a clear, well-argued thesis. Indeed, many of the endnotes read like mini-historiograpical essays; here Citino discusses interpretative controversies surrounding many key assertions in the book. His assessment of the 1942 German campaign in the Soviet Union is especially noteworthy, not simply in its discussion of the operational details, but the manner in which he demonstrates that a unique way of fighting, the German way of war, died in the steppes of southern Russia. With better decision-making and operational plans, could the Germans have fared better in Russia in 1942? The answer is almost certainly yes. Would such victories have changed the outcome of the war? Given the enormous economic potential of the United States and its development of the atomic bomb, the answer is almost certainly no.


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## archade (Jul 6, 2008)

David Lee. Beachhead Assault: The Story of the Royal Naval Commandos in World War II. London: Greenhill Books, 2004. 272 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, bibliography, index., ISBN 1-85367-619-5. 

Reviewed for H-War by Robert W. Duvall, History Instructor, Hanford West High School and Chapman University 

Paving the Way 

Many great works have been written about the amphibious invasions of World War II, covering the intricacies of operations like Torch, Husky, and Overlord. A missing element in many of these histories, though, is the preparation that happens before the first wave of landing craft hits the beaches. David Lee has written a book that helps fill that niche. Beachhead Assault tells the story of the Royal Naval Commandos whose job it was to prepare the beaches, paving the way for allied invasion forces. 

Although not as famous as their army and marine counterparts, the Royal Naval Commandos were as highly trained and as courageous. Raids early in the war by the British against German-occupied France convinced Combined Operations command that specially trained naval commandos were needed to reconnoiter, map, mark, and direct landing craft during an amphibious operation. In addition, these commandos had to destroy beach obstacles, conduct fire support, direct the unloading of craft, and defend themselves from enemy fire. Beachhead Assault traces the evolution of the naval commandos from recruitment to their training at HMS Armadillo and  numerous operations in which they were involved. During the war, twenty-two commando groups were created, and they participated in all major and minor amphibious operations in the European theater, including some in the Pacific. Lee does a wonderful job showing how the commando groups perfected their methods and craft, from the awkward and unorganized Mediterranean landings in 1942 to the heroic efforts at Normandy and Elba. 

Beachhead Assaul t weaves numerous oral history interviews with a traditional history narrative. Lee had the enviable and unique opportunity to interview hundreds of naval commando veterans through his contact with the Royal Naval Commando Association. Those interviews, letters, and discussions provide the lifeblood of this book. The stories of these men offer insight into their daily lives as soldiers in training and in war, recounting the humor, idiocy, horror, and courage that war brings to the lives of those who live it. For the historian and World War II buff, this book explains the procedures taken to secure and clear a beach for assault, the importance of having an organized method of debarkation, and the role of naval commandos in providing fire support for invasion troops. The bravery of these men is documented in the pages of the text and a lengthy appendix listing all known medals awarded to naval commandos. 

While the eyewitness accounts are insightful and refreshing, the accompanying historical narrative is, in places, too brief and does not offer enough support to truly understand the role of the naval commandos. While the author does a nice job of describing how the operational practices of the commando groups changed and improved as the war progressed, he does not present enough background on the various battles to provide context for understanding the more focused role of the naval commandos. The reader is occasionally confused by the flow of the book and the significance of some oral history excerpts, because the accompanying narrative lacks specificity or description. In contrast, the final chapter on Operation Brassard, the invasion of Elba Island, was particularly good, offering the right mix of oral history with historical narrative. The book is targeted for a popular audience, since it does not have any footnotes or even a listing of veterans who contributed oral histories, making this book less useful than it could be to a historian doing research on amphibious operations. 

The Royal Naval Commandos were disbanded toward the end of the war as a result of the Admiralty's decision to assign all responsibilities for naval beach preparation and debarkation to the Royal Marines. The short lifespan of the Royal Naval Commandos does not diminish their importance. The lessons learned by them have had an impact on the training, planning, and execution of amphibious operations over the past sixty years. Beachhead Assault is a compact, readable account of their exploits.


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## archade (Jul 6, 2008)

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, ed. Dangerous Strait: The U.S.-China-Taiwan Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xii + 272 pp. Notes, index., ISBN 978-0-231-13564-1. 

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Qiang Zhai, Department of History, Auburn > University Montgomery 

Staying off the Shoals 

In Taiwan, 2008 is a presidential election year. Alongside the presidential poll, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is pushing plans to hold a referendum on whether the island should join the United Nations under its own name. Mainland China has reacted by condemning the DPP effort as an attempt to promote Taiwan's independence and by urging the United States to restrain Chen Shui-
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker. In addition to an extremely useful introductory chapter on the main findings and conclusions of the contributors, the volume includes seven well-crafted essays covering the history of bian, Taiwan's lame-duck president. The renewed tension between Beijing and Taipei poses a serious challenge to Washington and threatens to destabilize East Asia and make the Taiwan Strait "dangerous" again. To understand the historical context of the Taiwan Strait crisis and to develop solutions on how to avoid disaster, there is no better place to start than the timely and well-researched collection of essays edited by  Taiwan's democratization process, emergence and development of theTaiwanese independence movement, role of Lee Teng-hui in Taiwan's political evolution, economic interactions between Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan's defense reforms and military modernization program, U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation, and Washington's policy of strategic ambiguity toward the Taiwan Strait standoff between Beijing and Taipei. 

Shelley Rigger applies political scientist Larry Diamond's theory on democratic consolidation to her examination of Taiwan's democratization process. According to Diamond, a regime must accomplish three tasks to consolidate a new democracy: democratic deepening, political institutionalization, and regime performance. Judging by Diamond's standard, Rigger points out that there are both strengths and shortcomings in Taiwan's democratization. She argues that Taiwan's democracy has performed well on democratic deepening but unsatisfactorily in the areas of political institutionalization and regime performance. She concludes that, despite the weaknesses inTaiwan's democratic consolidation, there is no evidence that the population on the island is prepared to jettison democracy and restore authoritarian institutions.
The growth of the Taiwanese independence movement is the subject of Steven Phillips's chapter. According to Phillips, a half century of Japanese domination laid the foundation for much of the dispute between the Taiwanese and the nationalists. The authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-shek's government alienated the Taiwanese and spurred their separatist tendencies. The Republic of China's increasing international isolation following President Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 cast doubts about the regime's credibility and legitimacy and raised uncertainties about the island's future. Although during much of its existence the Taiwanese independence movement remained a "disorderly" and "faction-ridden" coalition without international support, it "is nevertheless stumbling toward success today" (p. 68). 

Combining his personal knowledge about Lee with careful scrutiny of the record, Richard Bush addresses the issue of the role of Lee in the rise of the separatist movement in Taiwan. As chairman of the board and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan, Bush had close contact with Lee. He argues that Lee as president did not object to unification in principle, but opposed unification on Beijing's terms. Lee's basic approach to unification included three elements:"within the context of a unified China, the governing authorities in Taipei possessed sovereignty and were essentially equal to the government in Beijing; Taiwan had the right to play a significant role in the international community; [and] Beijing's growing military capabilities and its refusal to renounce their use was an obstacle to reconciliation" (p. 90). 

T. J. Cheng discusses the nature of the economic ties between Taiwan and China as well as their implications for the island. He rejects the term "economic integration" in describing the economic relationship across the Taiwan Strait, because "economic integration is a goal-driven process that nation-states legally commit to and consciously promote" and that condition does not exist between Taiwan and China (p. 94). Cheng characterizes the economic interaction across the Taiwan Strait as asymmetric, because Taiwan has grown more dependent on China for export and investment opportunities. He contends that "the high cost of replacing Taiwan's investment and suspending trade with Taiwan" shield the island against Beijing's political manipulation and create mutual dependency (p. 104). "Asymmetric economic interdependence," Cheng concludes, "does not seem to give Beijing leverage to coerce Taipei, nor does it necessarily turn Taiwan businessmen ... into a pro-unification force" (p. 94). 

Michael Swaine's chapter investigates the basic goals of Taipei's defense reform and modernization attempts, and it assesses the achievements to date and the remaining issues confronting the realization of those goals. He demonstrates that Taiwan's military leaders have responded to the demands of transforming a party army into a national defense force and of accepting civilian control and the oversight of the legislative branch of government. 

Taiwan remains the most sensitive and disruptive issue between China and the United States. The last two chapters by Michael Chase and Nancy Tucker examine the triangular relationship among Beijing, Washington, and Taipei. Chase traces the evolution of security cooperation between Taiwan and the United States and highlights the frequent disagreement between them over weapons procurement and threat perceptions. Reconsidering the debate concerning Washington's longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity in the Taiwan Strait, Tucker asserts that "the conditions under which the policy was devised still pertain and that it would be a costly mistake to jettison it" (p. 14). 

In sum, all the essays in this volume are of h igh quality. They should be read by everyone concerned with peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.


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## archade (Jul 12, 2008)

Robin Neillands. The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 292 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0253-34781-7. 

Reviewed for H-War by Jean Morin, Independent Scholar 

A Flawed Plan from the Start 

Robin Neillands is a prolific author who has made many names for himself in many genres and whose output defies boldly the confines of time. As well as having written perhaps ninety books under various noms de plume, he has become one of the most popular military historians in the book market of the last decade. His study Bomber War (2001), was outstanding. Sadly, Robin Neillands died last year at the age of 70, not quite finished with a biography of Montgomery.

His book on Dieppe was among his last. It is one for which he was well qualified, having been a Royal Marines commando himself and having befriended such luminaries in the field of "coups de main" as generals R. D. "Titch" Houghton and Peter Young (DSO [Distinguished Service Order] in Dieppe), who shared memories with him of their own involvement in cross-Channel raids during the Second World War, including that of Dieppe. Neillands has obviously had personal experience in learning to plan such operations or walk the talk of the commando, and his book is professional and sensible. The British commandos did well on the periphery of Operation Jubilee and one gets the impression that this Dieppe study wants to make them shine.
    In comparison with the Canadian side of the operation, this proves easy. Although Neillands is never outwardly harsh or accusatory he is in fact perhaps too understated in some of his obvious conclusions his review of the planning of the operation is clear-sighted and questioning. A reader can in fact follow in this book a poignant plaidoirie that gently leads to a silent gallows. 

Most of the evidence of shortfall in this large-scale raid of August 1, 1942 is directly linked to the staff planning of the operation, and when holes in the basic staff work are shown to be gaping, the Canadian army's reputation can scarcely be pummeled. Indeed, in the end one has the impression that theventure was framed from the start by a terribly bungled plan that can be imputed mostly to the Canadians themselves. "No other Allied operation of the Second World War saw such a loss in such time"(p. 2). The 2nd Canadian Division, indeed, the Canadian Corps, comes across as terribly jejune, pretentiously defiant, self-assured by a reputation acquired by other soldiers in other times. Canadians wanted to fight literally at any price, having had to vegetate in England for two years, hearing ashamedly of other nations' toil and bloodletting against the Nazis or the Japanese. Why no one blew the whistle on Operation Jubilee's disorganized staff work is mostly due to the fact that the Canadians, in 1942, could not recognize haphazard staff work if they saw it and mistook military operations for picnics. 

The book is well organized and leads well into the recounting of the preparation and action. Neillands is forced to address the central question of the lack of authorization for the second iteration of Operation Rutter, renamed Jubilee, an unavoidable aspect of the story which Brian Villa has already clarified in his thorough study.[1] He adds nothing new and simply quotes and paraphrases Villa in places. Jubilee, it is clear, was sneaked past the Chiefs of Staffs Committee. Neillands also methodically raises a somewhat rhetorical question of how such an operation could have been conducted without a proper "Estimate of the Situation," but despite citing a letter by the commander of the 2nd Canadian Division, General John Hamilton "Ham" Roberts, deploring the lack of such due process, the text does not prove that such an estimate was never done. That any such estimate was perfunctory is, however, a given. The fact that Canadian colonel Churchill Mann, chief of staff for General Roberts, was enthusiastic about the "advantage of simplicity" of the frontal assault (p. 103), reveals him as perhaps not unintelligent, but thoroughly ignorant of raiding techniques.  

But what comes across as the most important of the many lacunae in the Canadians' approach to the operation is the obvious and grave lack of exploitation of available intelligence (one is tempted to see the word in its double meaning here). Much more was known about the defenses of Dieppe than was used in the planning of Rutter and Jubilee, and it seems quite incredible that any divisional chief of staff tasked with such a plan would have been so dismissive of key data. Given the sheer number of German troops known to be in the vicinity of Dieppe, the operation should not have been expected to be successful, even with the advantage of absolute surprise--never the sole factor to be counted on in war. 

    Many have tried to put the blame on Lord Louis Mountbatten, Winston Churchill's protégé as "Chief" of Combined Operations, or perhaps naval captain John Hughes-Hallett, the substitute naval commander for Jubilee, ortheir respective British staffs, as the culprits of this bungled enterprise. The circumstances were also such, in July 1942, that a visible piece of action on French soil would so please both Americans and Soviets that undoubtedly the "second front" factor had some awesome sucking power. But one need not go past generals Andrew McNaughton, the commander of the Canadianan army in Europe, Harry Crerar, the corps commander, Roberts, and Mann to find terrible and irredeemable fault. Each had the clout to blow a whistle when, in rapid succession, high-caliber naval firepower, airborne flanking, and Bomber Command's support were withdrawn from the Rutter plan, leaving the Jubilee landing vulnerable like a moth in the limelight. A call to abort would undoubtedly have been seen, except perhaps by the Soviets, as reasonable. But the Canadians were the ones who would not accept being taken off the task. They wanted it like air to breathe. Nothing seemed to quench their folly. That Mountbatten let the thing happen cannot be indicted. Raiding is to warfare what jabbing is to boxing. You use it to keep the opponent busy and expect it in return. Combined Ops had a jabbing job to do and there stood a gung-ho, strapping tyro prizefighter itching to be let loose. 

  The story of such carnage as happened at the Puys cul de sac, or on the pebble beaches of what is termed here "a target that soldiers wise in amphibious warfare would have left well alone" (p. 272), or  in the sloping shooting ranges along the river Scie, suffices to paint Canadian red tabs as ignorant hands awash in the manslaughter of their own troops. 

  There have been many debates on what can be termed "lessons learned" in the Dieppe affair. Neillands in a subdued way--he can be maddeningly gentlemanly in assessing blame, when the evidence that he brings cuts like a cleaver--points to one lesson that cannot be questioned as having had an influence on all Allied staffs for the rest of the war: that ineffectual staffs like the Canadians get many people killed very fast. 

  Each Canadian Army Staff College candidate should be given a pebble from the beach of Dieppe to sew in the lining of his coat. 

  Note 

[1]. Brian Villa, Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid_ (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1989).


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## archade (Jul 12, 2008)

Jeff Guy. The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. xii + 276 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography, index, ISBN 978-1-86914-048-9. 

Reviewed for H-SAfrica by Aran MacKinnon, History Department, University of West Georgia 

War, Law, and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion 

In The Maphumulo Uprising, Jeff Guy has crafted a gripping story of the political machinations, chiefly intrigues, and paranoid colonial imaginations that surrounded the remarkable African effort to resist Natal intrusions and exactions during the Zulu, or "Bambatha," Rebellion of 1906. Guy brings to the project all his considerable expertise in the history of Natal and Zululand, and he greatly illuminates the story. Yet, as Guy notes, this monograph is the product of his effort "to go into the minutiae of events and to dig deeper into the local records" (p. 268). It reflects a "process of increasingly specialized research" (p. 268). This specialized detail is perhaps both the book's strength and its shortcoming. While Guy has brought to life, with his usual fiery passion, the excruciating details of killings and reprisals in the final days of the rebellion, at times, he has left the reader wondering about the broader picture. 

Guy opens the book with a tantalizing prologue in which he sets out the players in the tragic story of the struggle of a Zulu community to combat colonial incursions. It is a graphic tale of the intense violence meted out by the Natal colony, which, Guy reminds us elsewhere, Winston Churchill once called the "'hooligan of empire'" for its brutal handling of the rebellion.[1] It is also a gripping tale of Zulu rituals and spiritual preparations for defense in war. Guy discusses the cleansing and strengthening ceremonies performed by izinyanga (doctors, herbalists) and presided over by chiefs of the people of the Lower Thukela and Maphumulo districts; he covers their violent, sometimes gruesome, retributions against Natal soldiers and colonists; and he points to how they, then, came to be caught in the net of colonial military and legal power. Guy rightly spends little time on the overall course of the rebellion. As he notes, the story of the rebellion and its aftermath is familiar territory. There are, after all, a number of detailed contemporary accounts (including James Stuart's A History of the Zulu Rebellion 1906 and of Dinuzulu's Arrest, Trial and Expatriation [1913]) and much excellent scholarship, beginning with Shula Marks's seminal work Reluctant Rebellion (1970) and Ben Carton's Blood from Your Children (2000). Most recently, Guy has published the critically acclaimed Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906 (2007) based on a series of lectures he conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Killie Campbell Africana Library.[2] 

In the brief first chapter, "Conquering Natal," Guy provides the broad brushstrokes of the provocations leading to the rebellion and the conduct of the rebellion. While this chapter sets the stage for his focused analysis of the Maphumulo Uprising, it does not provide the reader with the broader framework in which to situate the fascinating events that unfolded in African society toward the end of the rebellion. It is curious, for example, given what appears to be a clear element of irredentist millenarianism in the intent of the purification and fortification rituals and ceremonies, that Guy does not make some comparison with Jeff Peires's important work on the Xhosa cattle killing,The Dead Will Arise (1989). Similarly, discussions about the colonial Natal legal framework, which is at the center of the story, could have benefited from reference to Thom McClendon's work on the foundations of customary law in Natal in Genders and Generations Apart (2002). There is, however, much engaging material in the remaining chapters of the book. 

In chapter 2, Guy offers, in great detail, the local context for the Maphumulo Uprising. Here, his intimate knowledge of the region provides the reader with such a vivid sense of the surrounds--the wagon tracks where military convoys stirred dust clouds as they passed, the exact locations of people's homes, and the contours and vegetation of the land--that one easily imagines being there. This sense is enhanced by excellent maps, rendered in three-dimensional color. Just as Norman 
    Etherington provided (in his masterful The Great Treks [2001]) a fresh perspective--a more African perspective--on the importance of the local terrain in shaping history, Guy brings alive the land and people. We can, therefore, better appreciate the stories of the chiefs and people who, in June 1906, faced the crisis of rebellion as it exploded from the pressures of the colonial context. In this chapter, Guy fleshes out pressures on the African homesteads in the area. He also offers new insights into chiefly politics and the contestations over power among chiefs, izinduna (headmen), and household heads. In this chapter, he, moreover, begins to trace carefully the strands of mythmaking by Stuart and others who portrayed Africans in such a negative light in the colonial imagination, and the likes of which have been laid bare so clearly in Carolyn Hamilton's seminal work, Terrific Majesty (1998). 

There are some missing elements here, which could have enhanced the foregrounding of the rest of the book and provided signposts to its broader significance. Given that we are presented with such an intimate portrait of these local patriarchal political and domestic dynamics, for example, it would have been helpful to know something more about how women fit into the story and about their voices in these circumstances. It would also have helped to illuminate the broader context in which segregation was worked out in Natal, as well as in Zululand, if there was more discussion on land tenure for Africans on white-owned lands and on the relations of chiefs to white landowners in the Maphumulo district. As Guy states, the colony of Natal was "acquired by negotiation" with African patriarchs, not by conquest as in Zululand (p. 45). The picture that emerges from Maphumulo Uprising is one of intense colonial machinations calculated if not to precipitate a rebellion led by chiefs on whom the colonial administration fixed the legal principle of collective responsibility, then to justify at least their brutal crushing if a rebellion should happen to come along. This would, at least in the case of Natal proper, seem to be at odds with the arguments about the negotiated foundations of the colony. The answer to this may lie in the different and sometimes contending perspectives of the various blocs in Natal colonial society: white farmers, large landowners, sugar barons, colonial administrators, colonial troops, imperial advocates, etc. Although Guy mentions some of these interests, he could, perhaps, have provided a clearer picture of the importance of the local uprising if he disaggregated and more fully analyzed the component parts of Natal colonial society. Admittedly, space constraints may not have permitted for this. 

 In the following chapters, Guy delves deeper into the events of June 1906 in Maphumulo, and these are perhaps the most interesting parts of the study. Here, he provides riveting details of the duplicitous colonial agents who had already penetrated the rural areas: the stock inspectors who doubled as colonial spies and Africans accused of being co-opted by Natal. In chapters 3 and 4, we also do get a sense of the broader regional picture. Guy discusses the rural-urban links of African workers in Durban and Johannesburg, and the roles of Christian mission-educated Africans in the rural political economy. Guy also lays out the developments of the African resistance in Maphumulo, which boiled over into outright assaults and murder of local white civilians, such as storekeepers and colonial troopers and police. There is, 
moreover, fascinating material on the culture and perspectives of the average colonist during the rebellion. Guy notes a chilling link between the brutal suppression of the uprising and the colonial ethos that disposed whites to view the whole affair as good sport. He indicates, for example, that the Castle Beer Company sponsored a machine gun and the gunnery crew for use in suppressing the rebellion--a remarkable testimony to the dubious relationship among drink, "sport," and colonial culture (p. 89). The outcome of such settler bravado was, as Guy shows, as devastating as it was relished by a smug and self-satisfied white population. Over five hundred Africans were killed in one skirmish that was celebrated in the colonial press as having an appropriate demoralizing effect on the resisters. Much looting and further violence to Africans and their homesteads followed.
In part 2, Guy turns to the question of colonial law and the courts. Here, we see the detailed workings of the Natal system of "justice" and how it was differentially applied to Africans. There is much that lends itself to a consideration of the absurd theater of the colonial project and the charade of legitimacy in which officials sought to cloak it. As Guy reveals the malicious and capricious ways in which Natal officials treated those arrested in the aftermath of the uprising--the shocking and ominous cover photograph for the book shows a broken and emaciated African rebel and victim of the colonial jails--one cannot but help wonder why Natal even bothered with such a thin veneer of due process. Yet, it is in this analysis that Guy tends to want to create a sense of, perhaps, greater unity in opposition among Africans than the realities of social stratification might support. In some instances, he argues that the chiefs in Maphumulo still commanded great loyalty and respect and so were unlikely to lose control over their people. However, there are clear indications that the common people were driving the resistance in the face of less than enthusiastic chiefs. Similarly, the colonial state had been successful in drawing in African police and troops from the region as it conducted its investigations and arrests. The remainder of part 2 details the conduct of the court cases against rebels, chiefs, and commoners alike. Here, we get a clear sense of the disconnect between some chiefs and their followers, as well as the limits of colonial power. Indeed, as Guy shows, at least some of what the Natal authorities sought to achieve in punishing through executions and further subordinating Africans was not achieved. 

 Finally, in part 3, Guy turns to the relationship among rebellion, law, colonial power, and African ritual, and renders bare the realities of "colonial justice" through his analysis of court records. What he reveals is a compelling and important argument. It was in the interstices of quotidian local colonial administration that power relations in the system of segregation in Natal were worked out. As Guy considers the evidence prosecutors brought before the courts, he shows the dramatic and ultimate paradox of colonialism and segregation in Natal; no matter how close the proximity of Africans and whites living and working together, most whites were profoundly conditioned by their racism and cultural arrogance. The paranoid colonial imagination constructed images and attributed motives to Africans that were wholly or in large part simply not supported by what they saw and experienced. Whites saw all herbalists and diviners as "witch doctors" dedicated to the destruction and expulsion of whites, and all Africans as at once infantilized manual laborers and murderous traitors to "white civilization." What the colonialists could not see was the terrible oppression the system had wrought on African society, and that the 
rebellion, as well as the "dangerous Africans" who participated in it, was of their own making. 

In the final analysis, Maphumulo Uprising is an excellent addition to the history of the rebellion. The compelling evidence is brought to life in a masterful way, and Guy brings home clearly the message of bias and oppression in this part of colonial Natal. Yet, there is also more to say about what we can learn from this narrowly focused story and the implications it has for understanding the broader political economy ofsegregation and oppression in South Africa, and such a study from Guy would be welcome. 

 Notes 

[1]. Jeff Guy, "The Hooligan of the Empire," Mail and Guardian October 9 2006 http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?area=/insight/> insightafrica/&articleid=286151 

 [2]. In 2007, this book was a nominee on the long list for the prestigious Alan Paton Award for nonfiction. For more information on the lectures and the book, see the Campbell Collections at http://campbell.ukzn.ac.za/?q=taxonomy/term/1221


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## archade (Jul 12, 2008)

Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, ISBN 978-0748622979, 978-0748622986. 

Reviewed for H-War by Mark R. Hatlie, History and Government Program, University of Maryland University College, Europe Division 

War and Memorial Culture 

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn. 

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable. 

Chapters cover the struggle by individuals, families, armies, and states to cope with--that is, count, identify, and properly mourn--the unprecedented numbers of dead soldiers and, eventually, civilians as well. Expectations and cultural norms could hardly be reconciled with the extraordinary situation and the opening chapters systematically discuss the various tensions. After a chapter on enemy bodies, there are two final chapters on memory, rituals, and commemorations. Much of this material, especially the last two chapters, will be familiar to many scholars. As a general overview of the research in the field it covers not only the structural and institutional aspects of mass death in war, but trends such as the role played by war in the evolving sensibilities with regard to death, changes in the use of images of the dead, and changing cultural practices both on and off the battlefield. 

The examples of public memorial culture from the Vichy and occupation period of 1941-44 represent one of the strengths of the book. They appear throughout, but especially in the final section, on ritualized mourning. Because of the particular circumstances, these examples show quite effectively the political dimension of public mourning in wartime.  
A primary weakness of the work stems from some lack of familiarity with the American Civil War of 1861-65. If their work had been informed by the more recent work of Drew Gilpin Faust (This Republic of Suffering, 2008), for example, the authors would have begun their discussion of national cemeteries for war dead at Antietam and Gettysburg instead of starting later, in Europe. More trivially, Andersonville is a "great battle" instead of an infamous prisoner of war camp (p. 157). Also, the role of images of death, primarily photographs, gets a nod in War Dead. Students of the Civil War, citing the work of Mathew Brady and others, would presumably put more emphasis on the American experience in the history of wartime images of death. One can also make the case that the shock of mass death in the American Civil War--a proportion of the population equivalent to several million deaths in today's United States--marks a contrast to past experience just as stark as World War I did for Europe, the focus of this book and other recent literature. 

Indeed, Faust's study of death and dying in the American Civil War makes a good contrast with War Dead for highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. By focusing on one place and time, Faust can delve much more deeply into the culture, tracing such developments as American notions of domesticity and the "good death," the tension between religious and secular interpretations of death, dying and the conflict in general, and the roles of race and gender. She can also more closely test the relationship between democracy and the paternal treatment of fallen citizens in wartime. There is even a chapter on killing (although not as in depth and psychological as David Grossman's On Killing, 1995). Faust can offer vivid examples of such themes as the efforts of families to recover bodies and record in detail the practices and circumstances of their recovery efforts. 

Capdevila and Voldman are more ambitious, covering much more ground in far fewer pages. The result is that larger patterns and contexts emerge, but the examples jump rapidly from place to place and time to time, often leaving the reader curious about the potential depth of the claim. Some themes are explored in more depth over a paragraph or several pages: the commemorative efforts of French Jews following World War I, for example, or the tombs of the Unknown Soldier in Europe and the Americas.

Both studies have chapters on the treatment of enemy bodies. Faust goes into great detail and explores the concrete circumstances and policies involved on both sides--for example, federal efforts to count, name and bury Union soldiers while intentionally leaving the rebels to rot in the open air. Capdevila and Voldman start by putting the subject into the context of developing international norms and laws, offering useful and highly relevant background material. They then proceed by themes centered on the practices and motives of the living with regard to dead bodies, showing practices ranging from respectful to horrific treatment. 

Some examples, however, are not drawn from wartime, but from the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. Their practice of "disappearing" political enemies makes a good example for their case of how bodies can be used as a political weapon, but it is not a very convincing comparison to the mass disappearance of bodies in the artillery barrages of 1914-18 or swallowed up in improvised battlefield mass graves from Cold Harbor to Stalingrad. Both the scale and the circumstance differ appreciably and, hence, comparing the motives and practices becomes questionable. The coverage of the Chilean and Argentinean cases is all the more out of place because the reviewer was anticipating the Latin American cases to include more examples from, say, the Chaco War of the 1930s. But, it is mentioned only briefly in earlier contexts. The inclusion of the Holocaust in the section on enemy bodies is more convincing, although also is not about "combat" deaths. 

Each chapter has end notes, and the book has a thematic bibliography. Most of the literature cited is in French, so the book gives the non-French reader an introduction to the state of the field in that country. The translation is easy to read quickly, despite a handful of awkward passages that may also be in the original. The book would make a good general survey for undergraduate use in classes on war and society, or Western cultural history.


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## archade (Jul 12, 2008)

Lloyd Steffen. Holy War, Just War: Exploring the Moral Meaning of Religious Violence. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. xxviii + 300 pp. Notes, index, ISBN 978-0-7425-5848-9. 

 Reviewed for H-Catholic by Elizabeth A. Linehan, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph's University Religious Ultimacy and Moral Vision: The Challenge of Violence 

Violence committed in the name of religion is a particularly troubling feature of our world. Certainly the phenomenon is not new; think of the Crusades. The forms it takes today seem particularly acute and threatening, however. Lloyd Steffen recalls these examples in the preface to his book on religious violence: the People's Temple suicides; the Branch Davidian events in Waco, Texas; the Aum Shinrikyo gassings in Tokyo; and of course the 9/11 attacks in the United States. 

Many responses to the connection of violence with religion are possible. On one hand, perhaps those doing the violence have misinterpreted religion--or their own religious tradition--so that the violence is not a product of "true" religion. Religion is reflective of a good God, and so its counsels rightly understood are necessarily good. At the other 
extreme, some argue that the destructive potential of religion is strong reason for eradicating it. I think here of Christopher Hitchens's writings, notably God Is Not Great (2007). 

Lloyd Steffen maintains that religion is powerful and it is dangerous. It is powerful in that it motivates action: "in human culture religion is something people do" (p. 7). It is dangerous because of its potential for creating violence. It is a virtue of Steffen's book that he does not beg the question of religion's necessary goodness. "Goodness" is a moral category, and religion can be good or bad. It is also a virtue that the discovery of destructive potential within religion does not lead him to reject it wholesale. Instead, he stakes out the moderate middle ground. 

Steffen's strategy is to examine the ways people choose to be religious from the moral point of view. He claims, with ample justification, that religious practice can be life-affirming, but it can also be life-destroying or, as he says, "demonic" (chapter 3 is entitled "Being Religious: the Demonic Option"). The key differentiating factor is whether what a religion takes to be "ultimate" is also considered "absolute." "Violence," he says, "emerges from religion only when Ultimacy is transformed and becomes equated with the idea of the Absolute" (p. 23). The notions of "ultimacy" and "absolutism" are so central to Steffen's discussion that I wish he had defined them more precisely than he does. An approximation for "ultimacy" is "that than which no greater can be conceived," following Anselm's famous ontological argument (p. 15). A clearer definition is "a source of meaning that has no superior and cannot be transcended" (p. 15). Ultimacy does not have to be conceived in absolutist terms; that is, as a concept that "suffers no restrictions, admits no limitations, and allows no exceptions" (p. 25). In the abstract, however, it is unclear to me how "ultimacy" escapes becoming absolutized. 

Steffen's analysis of three ways religious people respond to violence, in the second part of the book, does help to clarify what he is criticizing and what he is endorsing. In many ways the discussion of pacifism, holy war, and just war is the richest and most valuable part of the book. Each of these can be found in life-affirming religious forms, and in demonic forms. Although it is initially surprising to find pacifism portrayed in its demonic form, as Steffen does here, he is surely correct that there are radical forms of pacifism that disengage from human society and allow evil to be perpetrated without opposition. His Tolstoy-Gandhi contrast, representing life-denying and life-affirming commitments to nonviolence, is well made. The form of radical pacifism Tolstoy eventually embraced is an absolute (exceptionless) rejection of force of any kind, and ultimately of engagement with human institutions in defense of the good of life. Thus he leaves the field to the forces of evil. Gandhi, on the other hand, advocated nonviolent resistance to evil. Steffens says, of Gandhi's key principle of satyagraha, "As a nonabsolutist form of nonviolent but morally engaged pacifism, satyagraha serves to expand the goods of life, promote the goods of life, and enact a vision of goodness" (p. 81). 

The examination of holy war focuses primarily on Islam, although the chapter begins with an examination of ancient Israel. "Holy war" is defined generically as "any use of force justified by appeal to divine authority" (p. 182). The moral presumption is against holy wars, precisely because appeal to God's will seems to transcend moral critique. With regard to Islam in particular, Steffen concludes: "Whether Islam could advance the possibility of a holy war that is non-demonic and life-affirming must be subjected to moral critique independent of any appeal for justification to heaven … but Islam itself does not sanction such a move" (p. 229). 

For American readers who lack wide acquaintance with Islamic traditions, the detail and nuance of this section are especially valuable. Steffen shows that resources exist within Muslim traditions to critique claims that particular wars are willed by God. He also distinguishes "jihad" from "holy war," and shows how "jihad" can be interpreted in a life-affirming way. Careful reading will provide ammunition against current stereotypes of Islam. 

Steffen's discussion of just war covers ground that is more familiar to Western philosophers. I am in essential agreement with his construal of the theory, including his insistence that a moral presumption against the use of force "underwrites" the theory (p. 242). In its structure, a strong basic assumption with the possibility of justified exceptions (when the use of force is warranted), just war theory exemplifies the sort of moral thinking Steffen has all along implicitly appealed to, against absolutist claims. 

A reader's response to this book will depend on the extent to which s/he accepts some assumptions which Steffen relies on but does not really defend. There are many, but the most central is that moral evaluation can count on widely--or universally--shared moral presumptions. It depends, also, on one's response to the dilemma Socrates posed in the Euthyphro: Is piety good because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is good? If we are religious, should we determine what God would have us do based on our conception of the life-affirming and good, or should we depend on some revelation from God (whose ways are not our ways)? Steffen makes clear just how much turns on the answer to this classic question.


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## archade (Jul 12, 2008)

Niall Ferguson. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. lxxi  + 808 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-14-311239-6. 

Reviewed for H-German by Talbot Imlay, Département d'histoire, Université Laval, Québec 

An Awfully Bloody Awful Half-Century 

As a historian, Niall Ferguson is in a class by himself. He is the author of several best-selling books on topics such as the First World War, British and American empires, the role of money over the past three centuries, and the Rothschild banking family. Along the way, he has presented several television documentaries related to the subjects of his books and has written scores of editorials, book reviews, and articles for prominent newspapers and magazines. But Ferguson is not merely a successful--not to say, the most successful--public historian. Also to his credit is an academic monograph on politics and business in Hamburg during the opening three decades of the last century as well as an important edited collection on counterfactual (or virtual) history. If this were not enough, Ferguson has also published and continues to publish articles in leading academic journals. 

As befits someone of Ferguson's talent and energy, his latest book offers a panoramic study of war, conflict, and violence during the first half of the twentieth century. As with most of his earlier books, this one is ambitious in design and wide-ranging in scope. Its arguments are often convincing, sometimes provocative, and occasionally frustrating. The book, in short, is eminently readable despite its considerable length. Following recent scholarly trends that underscore the dark, not to say, catastrophic history of the twentieth century, Ferguson sets out to explain why its first five decades experienced such high and, indeed, unprecedented levels of violence and especially death. The answer, he argues, lies in three overlapping factors: ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires. The presence of these three factors distinguishes the period from earlier and later ones, and the changing mix of the three accounts for the variegated nature of the violence, whether in terms of place and time or in terms of the identity of victims and perpetrators. This variation notwithstanding, Ferguson suggests that the period should be viewed as a whole, as a "fifty years war" (or "war of the world")--one defined by multiple, sometimes overlapping regional conflicts that overflowed the temporal boundaries of 1914-18 and 1939-45. To this schema, Ferguson tacks on an additional argument concerning the decline of the West: the twentieth century, he insists, witnessed a transformation in world politics marked by the rapid end of western dominance over the East (Asia), a process due in no small part to the rippling effects of conflict and war. 

Ferguson constructs this sort of macro-narrative history as well as anyone, but that does not make it easy to review. Much is to be praised in Ferguson's book, not least the display of encyclopedic knowledge in confident, punchy prose. Typically for his work, Ferguson points to paths for further research, as with his argument that a key to explaining why wars end when they do is the question of whether combatants believe they can surrender without being killed by the enemy. 
When they do, they are more likely to surrender en masse, effectively ending a war.[1] And, as usual, Ferguson raises interesting questions, such as that of who really won World War II. One obvious answer is the western Allies, but their victory, he remarks, was "tainted" both by their association with the Soviet Union and by their questionable choice of weapons, most notably the strategic bombardment of enemy cities and, of course, the dropping of two atomic bombs. Another answer is that the Soviet Union won the war, but the magnitude of Soviet material and human loss cast a long shadow over this success, even if a German victory would have been unbearably worse. Taking a longer perspective, Ferguson suggests that Asia and especially China won the war, although here one might add that the price of Asia's rise (the presumed counterpart to the West's descent) was borne largely by Asians. Another and related question posed by Ferguson is the precise beginning and end of World War II. Any dates proffered are open to dispute, but Ferguson is certainly right to stress that 1939 and 1945 are inadequate markers for much of eastern Europe and Asia. 

Even in a work as laudable as this, some readers may find themselves questioning some of Ferguson's decisions about what to include in his narrative. To be sure, even books of this scope necessitate choices. But one does wonder whether two whole chapters on British appeasement policy towards National Socialist Germany are necessary in such a study. In other chapters, Ferguson gives prominent billing to the Nazi regime's revolutionary racial aims and policies, which culminated in genocide, as well as to the violence that the Stalinist regime inflicted on untold millions inside and outside of the Soviet Union's shifting borders. If the extended treatment of Nazi and Soviet atrocities is entirely justified, a more systematic discussion of Japanese war aims towards, and occupation policies in, Asia and the Pacific would have been welcome for comparative purposes. At various points in the book Ferguson suggests that Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union can be grouped under the rubric of totalitarianism. Perhaps so, but what about imperial Japan (not to mention fascist Italy)? Are the differences between the three regimes of a fundamental or merely incidental nature? 
More generally, Ferguson is clearly at his best when discussing events in Europe, with the result that Britain and Germany figure prominently, perhaps disproportionately. Asia, by comparison, appears to be given somewhat short shrift. 

One might also question the book's periodization. The "war of the world," Ferguson proposes, concluded in 1953 with the armistice in Korea. This choice, however, leads him to relegate the complex and sometimes brutal process of decolonization after 1945 to the book's afterword, a slightly odd choice for a study concerned with the reasons 
for the West's decline. More to the point, Ferguson's tripartite explanation might usefully be applied to several cases of decolonization. To take the example of the Algerian war, in addition to ethnic conflict and a declining empire, a good deal of economic volatility was present despite consistently strong growth, most obviously in the form of France's recurrent budget deficits and balance of payments crises but also in its inconsistent economic policies in Algeria.[2] 

For specialists in German history, a more important question for assessing this book will be the extent of its engagement with relevant literature. Even though the book is aimed principally at a non-specialist audience, and Ferguson can hardly have been expected to address all or even most of the specialist arguments in the vast literature on twentieth-century war and conflict in Germany, he might have done more to incorporate some recent, relevant scholarship. For example, in discussing the origins of war in 1914, Ferguson makes much of the point that investors and financiers appear to have discounted the possibility of war, which he takes as a starting point for two related arguments: that Europeans did not expect war in 1914 and that Europe was less militarized than is often portrayed. But if investors and financiers certainly had a stake in anticipating war, so too did general staffs, whose principal task was to contemplate and prepare for the eventuality of war. More to the point, the subject of pre-1914 German military strategy in particular has attracted a good deal of recent attention. Ferguson does refer to Terence Zuber's controversial thesis that there was no "Schlieffen Plan" and that Germany did not possess an offensive war plan, although it should be added that Annika Mombauer, Robert Foley, and others have effectively refuted Zuber's arguments. Zuber aside, however, Ferguson neglects the intriguing work of Stig Förster in particular on what might be termed the irrational elements of German war planning before 1914. For Förster, German military planners appear to have been far from confident that a future war would be short or that Germany could win it if it were prolonged. But rather than fostering caution, these doubts encouraged the belief that Germany must be willing to risk and wage war since the alternative, to admit that war was too uncertain an option, was simply unacceptable.[3] In the pressure-cooker of the 1914-18 period, moreover, this refusal to consider unacceptable options transmuted into a rejection of any outcome short of outright victory. As Germany's prospects dimmed, military and civilians leaders increasingly insisted that the decisive factor was not material capabilities but the will of the nation and people to triumph. From here, it was small step to the conviction that utter destruction of the nation was preferable to admitting defeat--a conviction that underpinned various proposals in 1918 for a national uprising and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Nazi regime during the Second World War.[4] 

The "irrational" nature of German war planning and war conduct raises the question of the extent to which Germany should be treated as a case apart--a version of the Sonderweg thesis. Despite the lack of an obvious answer, it is worth remarking that Ferguson's global perspective has the effect of crowding out a discussion of the question. In any case, given Ferguson's interest in the common elements of conflict across countries and regions, he might usefully have drawn from an approach to the study of war known as "cultures de guerre." Proponents of this approach, who have labeled themselves the "École de Péronne," after the war museum in the Somme, stress the importance of lived experience, of examining how war and its aftermath were understood by soldiers and civilians. How, they ask, did individuals and social groups respond to the omnipresence of danger, violence, death, and loss? Rejecting portrayals of people as largely passive victims of a massive, insatiable war machine, they prefer to see soldiers and civilians as active participants in giving meaning to their experiences. In fact, one common theme of their work is consent--the idea that people willingly accepted the increasingly onerous burdens of war, convinced as they were that their cause, unlike that of their enemies, was just, if not divinely sanctioned.[5] Given Ferguson's interest in the phenomenon of collaboration, most notably but not solely in terms of the Holocaust, the École de Péronne's work on the reasons for and nature of consent might have been worth exploring. More generally, the notion of war culture (or cultures) as pervasive, as marking language, the arts, family life, and political rituals among other things, not only merits further study in its own right, but also might be used as an additional means of distinguishing the period from others. 

Finally, Ferguson might have addressed the debate over the usefulness of the term "total war." The term is employed periodically and offhandedly here, always without definition. Partly in reaction to this sort of use of the term, several scholars working with the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., launched an extended project into the meaning of total war from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.[6] Although after five published volumes, no consensual definition of the term emerged, the project identified several factors, such as the increasing lethality of weapons, the mounting ability of governments and societies to mobilize resources, the collapsing distinction between combatant and non-combatant, and the expanding scope of war aims, which together helped to make wars longer as well as more deadly and destructive. But much remains to be explored, including the question of the inevitability--or otherwise--of the totalizing process of war. In his book, Ferguson underscores the role of ideologies, especially racist, expansionist ones, in the massive violence of the period. Yet, as the war on the Western Front during 1914-18 suggests, before the advent of thermonuclear weapons, any war involving several great powers would likely have been long, bloody, and cruel for both soldiers and civilians, independent of murderous ideologies.[7] This is not to say that latter are irrelevant to the course and to the origins of the conflicts of the period, but rather that it is not easy to distinguish, let alone to classify, the various factors tha t account for the unprecedented levels of violence. One advantage of engaging with the debates over the definition of total war is that it pushes one into thinking further about the role of various factors and of the interaction between them.

In the end, this book is an extended, stimulating study of a complex and fascinating subject. If this makes it a good read, it also all but ensures that a reviewer will consider the book through the lens of his or her own research interests. If Ferguson has not produced the final word on why the first half of the twentieth century witnessed such massive violence and death, he has certainly provided ample food for thought not only about the period in question, but also about our own age, in which ethnic tensions, economic volatility, and declining empires appear to be factors of increasing importance.

  Notes 

[1]. Ferguson further develops this argument in "Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat," War in History 11 (2004): 148-192. 

[2] On this question, see Matthew Connelly, "The French-American Conflict over North Africa and the Fall of the Fourth Republic," Revue française d'histoire d'Outre-Mer 84 (1997): 9-27; and Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie: comptes et mécomptes de la tutelle coloniale, 1930-1962 
(Saint-Denis: Societe francaise d'histoire d'outre-mer, 1997). 

[3]. Stig Förster, "Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges, 1871-1914. Metakritik eines Mythos," Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 54 (1995): 61-98. Förster tries to extend the argument beyond Germany in "Im Reich des Absurden: Die Ursachen des Ersten Weltkrieges," Wie Kriege entstehen: Zum historischen Hintergrund von Staatenkonflikten, ed. Bernd Wegner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 211-252. 

 [4]. See Michael Geyer, "Insurrectionary Warfare: the German Debate about a Levée en masse in October 1918," Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 459-527; and Bernd Wegner, "Hitler, der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Choreographie des Untergangs," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 493-518. 

[5]. For the approach, see Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre. Un essai historiographique (Paris: Seuil, 2004),  42-50, 217-233, 281-289; and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, "Violence et consentement: la 'culture de guerre' du premier conflit mondial" in Pour une histoire culturelle, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 251-271. It is worth adding that the argument about the dominance of consent has been vigorously criticized. For example, see Frédéric Rousseau, La guerre censurée. Une histoire des combats européens de 14-18 (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 7-23. 

[6]. For the final volume in the series, see Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

[7]. See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), parts 1 and  2; and 
 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6-30.


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## archade (Jul 27, 2008)

Augustus Richard Norton. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007. vi + 187 pp. Pictures, maps, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-691-13124-5. 

Reviewed for H-Levant by Joseph Alagha, Department of Humanities, > Lebanese American University 

Hizbullah: The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon 

According to Augustus Richard Norton, his purpose for writing Hezbollah: A Short History is the presentation of an "honest" as well as "more balanced and nuanced account of this complex organization," which Norton calls "the leading Shi`i political party in Lebanon" (pp. 8, 186). While Norton's book offers no startling new insights, it provides a synopsis of what is known about Hizbullah in a form that is both compact and usually well written.  

Nevertheless, there are many shortcomings. First, in a book tailored to the nonspecialist reader, Norton has omitted a considerable number of historical events that are crucial to understanding subsequent Lebanese history. These include the seminal Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which carved the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands into today's contemporary states. Furthermore, there is no discussion of the Cairo Agreement and its annulment, which are critical to any understanding of the changing relationship between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanon's Shi`a.[1] 

In addition, Norton's transliterations of Arabic and Farsi terms are quite inconsistent, a fact that often results in distortions. Furthermore, some of Norton's transliterations are not simply unorthodox, but constitute serious errors. For example, Norton refers to Iran's Supreme Leader as the rakbar (p. 90). Irrespective of which transliteration system one employs, rahbar is always spelled with an "h," not a "k." 

And the errors do not end there. In a photograph appearing on page 64, Norton identifies the person in the foreground as Sayyid `Abbas al-Musawi. It is actually Shaykh Ragib Harb, Hizbullah's most influential resistance leader in the south, who was assassinated by Israeli forces on February 16, 1984, and to whom the Open Letter, Hizbullah's 1985 founding document, is primarily dedicated. Sayyid `Abbas al-Musawi was himself assassinated on Feb. 16, 1992 while returning from ceremonies marking the eighth anniversary of Shaykh Ragib's assassination. Anyone researching Hizbullah should know the difference between these two men.
Such factual errors are distressingly frequent in Norton's book. For example, Imam Musa al-Sadr did not, as Norton implies, establish Harakat al-Mahrumin (the Movement of the Deprived) on his own (p. 19). Rather, al-Sadr joined with Greek Catholic Archbishop Grégoire Haddad in 1974 to found Harakat al-Mahrumin in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of Lebanon's poor regardless of their sectarian or ethnic affiliations. As such, the organization was initially open to persons from all sects. It was not until after the outbreak of the civil war that Harakat al-Mahrumin became a Shi`ite-based movement under the leadership of al-Sadr. Furthermore, the principal aim of al-Sadr's 1978 visit to Libya was not "to attend ceremonies commemorating the ascent of the Libyan leader" Muammar Qadhaffi to power (p. 21). In fact, al-Sadr's trip was motivated by a desire to end the Lebanese civil war. Having been informed that Qadhaffi was funding militias on both sides of the conflict, he planned to intercede with the Libyan leader to stop this practice. 

Norton's statements about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are also replete with errors. He asserts that "as of November 2006, at least 60 percent of all Lebanese [Shi`ites] follow Sistani, with the rest following Fadlallah. Very few consider themselves 'imitators' of Khamenei." (p. 151). It is worth noting that Khamene'i is the marja' al-taqlid (official source or authority of emulation) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Hizbullah's official marja', not marja'i, as Norton writes on page 100. On the same page, Norton states that Khamene'i "gave his blessings" to the party's participation in the Lebanese electoral process, thereby reducing the complexity, flexibility, and pragmatism of Shi`ite jurisprudence to individual whim. In point of fact, Hizbullah asked Khamene'i to provide a formal legal opinion (istifta') on the legitimacy of contesting the 1992 elections. As soon as Khamene'i authorized and supported (ajaza wa 'ayyada) participation, Hizbullah embarked on drafting its election program. 

Norton also fails to mention the national dialogue sessions that spanned the period between March and June of 2006. Given that the war broke out in July, it is no coincidence that the last two sessions (June 8th and 29th) were dedicated to the interrelated issues of Lebanon's defense strategy and the weaponry under Hizbullah's control. 

Norton's conclusion appears to serve as a postscript, as it reads like a chronology of events that occurred subsequently to those treated in the main text. Numerous errors are found here as well. First, Norton twice refers to General Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) as the "Free Political Movement" (pp. 153, 175). Norton's conclusions > about the 
FPM are equally mistaken, asserting that " 'Aounists' and the Shi`a share a profound sense of victimization in what they see as a corrupt and unresponsive political system" (p. 153). Although the FPM and Hizbullah might share a sense of victimization and disgust with corruption, such factors are incidental. They are not central to the historic ten-point Understanding between the two groups, let alone to an alliance based on mutual interest. A more plausible explanation is that the Christian nationalists (FPM) and the Muslim nationalists (Hizbullah) signed the aforementioned Understanding addressing relations with Syria and a variety of other political, economic, administrative, and security issues after the unrest of February 5, 2006 threatened to ignite a new civil war. 

Only in the final pages of his conclusion does Norton begin to offer some analytical insights, albeit far off the mark and contradictory. 
This applies to his insistence that "half-solutions and compromise usually prevail, just as they will likely prevail in the 2006 crisis" (pp. 157-158), as well as his forecast of the current political deadlock's resolution through "pragmatic compromises" (p. 159). It is difficult to reconcile this argument with Norton's contention that the FPM and Hizbullah are working "together to expand their share of power in significant measure at the expense of the Sunni Muslims" (p. 153). Norton's account of the crisis's unfolding is also in error: "Following the resignation of an allied Sunni member and in conjunction with these demands [veto over all government measures], all five Shi`i members of the government resigned from the cabinet" (p. 156). The five Shi`ite ministers actually resigned first, on November 11, 2006, to be followed a few days later by environment minister Jacob Sarraf, who happens to be Greek Orthodox, not Sunni Muslim. Furthermore, Sarraf is an ally of former President Émile Lahoud, and thus only indirectly allied with Hizbullah. 

Finally, Norton's book sometimes reads more like a defense and justification, rather than a scholarly analysis, of Hizbullah'sactions. For example, Norton seems eager to exonerate Hizbullah for several acts of terrorism, attributing these instead to Iran (p. 78). Norton also takes care in his conclusion to endorse Hizbullah's position on the July 2006 war, asserting that "it was utterly predictable that the Shi`a would emerge from the war as a mobilized, assertive, and more militant community" (p. 158). 

Despite its merits, Norton's Hezbollah: A Short History contains numerous errors of fact, interpretation, and attribution. A prominent scholar like Norton is expected to take more care with his text. And Princeton University Press clearly failed to exercise due diligence in the editing and peer review processes, thus failing both their author and their readers. Sadly, one can only assume that the topicality of this study's subject matter prompted a rush to publish, thus causing the imperatives of commerce to trump those of scholarship. 

Note 

[1]. The Cairo Agreement (CA) was signed on November 3, 1969 between Lebanon and the PLO granting the latter license to launch attacks from south Lebanon against Israel. The Lebanese parliament's annulment of the CA and all its corollaries were published in the Official Gazette on June 18, 1987 under law number 87/25.


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## archade (Jul 28, 2008)

James A. Tyner. The Business of War: Workers, Warriors, and Hostages in Occupied Iraq. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. viii + 152 pp. Bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-7546-4791-1. 

Reviewed for H-Levant by Christopher Parker, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Middle East and North Africa Research Group, Ghent University, Belgium 

What Kind of War Does Neoliberalism Make? 

In The Business of War, James A. Tyner provides an engaged and readable synthesis of scholarship and informed polemic produced in response to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. He situates this synthesis within a broader int ellectual framework that draws on Michel Foucault, as well as on the work of geographers and ethnographers concerned with contemporary configurations of neoliberal globalism (e.g., David Harvey, Derek Gregory, Aiwha Ong, etc.). In line with the method suggested by these sources, Tyner begins by tracing the genealogy of assumptions invoked to naturalize the Bush administration's Iraq project notably the sense of manifest destiny that has informed so much of America's engagement with the rest of the world over the past 200 years--and by sketching the broader history of corporate involvement in determining U.S. foreign policy interests (these being the subjects of chapter 2, "A War of Neoliberalism"). As Tyner notes, "we should not lose sight that economic ideologies--including but not limited to neoliberalism and neoconservatism--have greatly impacted the role and function of the military" (p. 16). 

But this book is ultimately motivated by a more profound sense of purpose. Tyner sets out to explore the nexus of neoliberalism and war by looking at how this intersection has inscribed itself on the bodies of migrant contract laborers held hostage in Iraq. In his own words: "My aim is to examine the political subjugation of hostages within OccupiedIraq as a means of articulating the de-humanization of neoliberalism and the business of war" (p. 4). This is a theme that Tyner appears to have stumbled across while on the heels of the Filipino migrant laborers who were the subject of his previous work. And it is one that is certainly worth exploring. Tyner sees the bodies of these hostages as emblematic of struggles to define the nature of the contemporary global system. 

Iraq clearly represents a new phase in "the business of war." Not only have the support functions of state-declared war been privatized to an extent previously unseen; close examination of the practices of private contractors in Iraq reveals the darker side of a world that has gradually been remade over the past three decades to make it amenable to neoliberal modalities of government. The role of the neoliberal model in Iraq's reconstruction is outlined in the first half of chapter 3, "The Business of Occupation." Tyner then calls attention to the contract laborers who have come from the slums of East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America to work for the private firms providing support services to the U.S. Army and other agencies involved in the reconstruction and government of Iraq. Tyner shows how this flow of migrant labor has been made possible by new forms of cooperation between state agencies and a transnational private sector empowered by neoliberal reforms. He also shows that these invisible minions play a crucial role in making the human and financial costs of war acceptable to the U.S. public. Meanwhile, for militant groups, these migrants have--in Tyner's estimation come to symbolize the militant neoliberal imperialism of the Anglo-American project in Iraq. 

Unfortunately, Tyner only begins the serious exploration of his central thesis midway into the fourth and penultimate chapter, "Spaces of Political Subjugation." Here, Tyner brings us to the plight of the hostages themselves by building on analysis of the Philippine government's position in advance of the Iraq war. Philippine authorities hoped, according to Tyner, that participation in the "coalition of the willing" would facilitate employment opportunities for Filipino laborers in the private-sector-led reconstruction effort. Tyner illustrates the consequences of such a policy by exploring the case of Angelo de la Cruz, a Filipino migrant laborer who was held hostage in Iraq for a relatively brief period in the summer of 2004. 

Tyner writes: "During de la Cruz's captivity, both the Philippine state, the Iraqi insurgents, and other participants attempted to inscribe > their own discourses on to the captive body of de la Cruz. Although powerlessness [_sic_] himself, de la Cruz continued to be subjected to various interpretations and meanings; his body, in effect, continued to work, albeit for larger political purposes.… From the perspective of the captors, de la Cruz was not an individual [but represented] something else entirely … the Coalition [and] the abstract concepts of modernity and capitalism. This is made clear in the demands made by the abductors" (p. 122). 

But Tyner does not in fact provide any convincing evidence that resistance to such abstract concepts lay behind the demands of most hostage-takers in Iraq, and it strikes me as presumptuous to suggest that most Iraqi militants imagine themselves as foes of modernity or capitalism per se. Equally, his subsequent assertion--that "the bodies of workers and warriors, from the perspective of the abductors, are re-scripted as the personification of an illegal and unjustified occupation of their homeland" (p. 123) seems somehow too easy a conclusion given the ambitious nature of this book. In trying to produce a meditation on the phenomenon of hostage-taking writ large a political-philosophical polemic in the tradition of George Orwell and Slavoj Zizek (two authors whose inspiration Tyner acknowledges)Tyner loses touch with local specificities. For example, he does not note that the overwhelming majority of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq have been truck drivers, suggesting that hostage-taking might--for most groups be a tactic employed in struggles over the control of trade routes. Flying high in search of a profound interpretation, Tyner overlooks the mundane, if not always obvious, alternative. And it is perhaps in the mundane rather than the heroic that we might find and understand the most powerful (and even universal) motivations of the agents in the story. 

The Business of War_ clearly bears the strains of being Tyner's third book in as many years. The relatively large number of typographical errors suggests a lack of careful editing. Some of the literature that he reviews does not seem fully integrated into his argument; and > Tyner's occasional reliance on a single source across significant passages of text reinforce the impression of a manuscript hurried to publication before the author had come to a fully digested synthesis. The force of Tyner's central argument is also weakened from the outset by his somewhat rushed (even slightly pedantic) discussions of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, globalization, transnationalism, and security. Given his promise to deliver "a political geographical polemic against the atrocities of a modern-day colonial war" (p. 2), Tyner might have found a more subtle way of integrating this background information into his account. Also, just when Tyner seems poised to take his argument in an interesting direction, he all too often falls back on the words of others, or on restatements of his main thesis that read somewhat like sloganeering. It is precisely because Tyner has an interesting and important argument to make that one would like to hear more of his own voice. Finally, as the critique in the previous paragraph suggests, Tyner would have done well to consult more of the specialist literature on Iraq, together with the available empirical studies of the occupation and the subsequent ongoing violence before meditating on the motivations of insurgent hostage takers. 

Nevertheless, in spite of these critical remarks, the individual chapters of this book--and particularly chapter 3--make useful reading for both students and the informed public. Tyner's writing is readable and engaging. Most importantly, however, Tyner is to be commended for calling attention to the large-scale exploitation of migrant labor as a practice enabled by three decades of worldwide neoliberal "reform," and one that ultimately enabled the Bush administration to go to war thinking that the full political costs might be avoided. He is absolutely correct to argue that investigation of this practice will likely offer insight into the nexus of neoliberalism and war, and to the darker side of neoliberal globalism more generally. This reviewer hopes that Tyner will continue to follow through on the important themes addressed by The Business of War in his future research. 

In conclusion, I cannot help but wonder what this book might have been had Tyner pursued a different (albeit admittedly longer and more difficult) route in writing it. One could have told the story of how a nineteenth-century ideology of manifest destiny gave rise to twenty-first-century neoliberal militarism--a project that Tyner shows is underwritten by the labor of some of the world's poorest and most politically disempowered inhabitants--through a deep and sustained account of Angelo de la Cruz's personal and family history. What historical forces give rise to conditions that compel someone to travel halfway around the world to work for meager wages in a war zone? What arrangements make possible the linkages and pathways that enable such a journey? What did such a journey entail? And what does the imprisonment and decapitation that awaited some of these migrants upon reaching > their destination say about the kind of war neoliberalism makes? As Walter Benjamin wrote: "Only when traveling along the road, can you say something about its force."[1] 

Note 

[1]. Walter Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings_ (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 352.


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## archade (Jul 28, 2008)

Richard K. Betts. Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, September 2007. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13888-8 (cloth).

Reviewers: Erik J. Dahl, Glenn Hastedt, Richard Russell 

Introduction by Joshua Rovner, Williams College 

"The intelligence community," writes Richard Betts, "is the logical set of institutions to provide what one might call the library function for national security: it keeps track of all sources, secret or not, and mobilizes them in coherent form whenever nonexpert policymakers call on them" (5). Intelligence is also the logical place to explore how states perceive the world around them. Decades of work by political scientists and diplomatic historians have attempted to uncover the roots of misperception and misjudgment in international relations. Betts' book focuses on the intelligence community itself: the set of institutions that is specifically tasked to ferret out information on international threats and opportunities. In the ideal, good intelligence informs policy judgment and leads to better decisions about strategy and statecraft. In reality, accurate and timely intelligence is hard to come by, and leaders are often wary of the intelligence community itself. Betts' long study of intelligence has revolved around the question of why it so often fails to approach the ideal. Enemies of Intelligence revisits some of his well-known answers, adds some new ones, and applies them to contemporary controversies. 

The obstacles to the effective use of intelligence are what Betts > calls the "enemies of intelligence." Outside enemies are the foreign targets of intelligence collection who conceal their activities and deceive the watchers. Innocent enemies include professional incompetence, poor organizational design, or other self-inflicted wounds that inhibit the quality of intelligence. Finally, inherent enemies refer to human limitations and trade-offs that come with decisions about  intelligence. Human beings suffer from cognitive biases that skew their perceptions; this happens to the intelligence producer as well as the intelligence consumer. The low-level intelligence analyst and the high-level policymaker both interpret information through the prism of their own preexisting beliefs. The fact that information necessarily passes through these filters ensures that there will always be space between the objective facts, the analysis of those facts, and the policymaker's response to new intelligence. Moreover, psychological limitations make it difficult to sense important changes in the international environment. Individuals look for patterns in the data, and this causes them to downplay or ignore anomalies. 

The implications are unsettling. The existence of inherent enemies means that the major problems of intelligence are unsolvable. The intelligence community can try to outfox the outside enemies and mitigate the innocent ones, but the inherent enemies limit the accuracy of estimates, the timeliness of warnings, and the ability of intelligence to influence decisions about national security. Surprise attacks and intelligence failures are inevitable. 

The reviewers in this roundtable agree that this is as a useful way to conceive of the obstacles to effective intelligence. Betts is unique among intelligence scholars for his devotion to theory, as well as his effort to make sure that his theories lead to practical recommendations for policymakers and intelligence officials. His three-part typology not only sheds light on the causes of failure, but it also speaks to the ongoing debates about intelligence reform in the aftermath of September 11 and the war in Iraq. Appropriate reforms must start with a plausible explanation for the causes of failure. Reforms that are decoupled from those causes will not improve performance, and those that ignore the inherent enemies of intelligence will be costly and futile. This idea, of course, is anathema to reform advocates who believe that the solution to intelligence failure is reorganization and that surprise attacks can be prevented through better bureaucracy. 

While the reviewers find the typology helpful, they also ask for elaboration. Erik Dahl begins by arguing that Betts puts too much emphasis on the inherent enemies. This is important for Betts because it underlies his claims about the futility of large scale reorganization, but the external and innocent enemies of intelligence beg for more discussion. 

Richard Russell argues that focusing too much on the inherent enemies cannot help us distinguish between different levels of intelligence performance over time. In the short term, intelligence officials need fine grained measures of success and failure in order to determine best practices. But there are broader implications in Russell's critique. The sense of fatalism in Enemies of Intelligence has implications for the public view of intelligence as well as the role of intelligence in the policy process. How can Congress and the public judge the intelligence community if we assume that surprises are inevitable? Why should we invest billions of dollars annually into a bureaucracy that is doomed to fail at least some of the time? What can policymakers expect from the intelligence services? Why should they bother reading intelligence in the first place? 

Russell and Dahl are both experienced intelligence officers and scholars, and they sympathize with the difficulties involved in providing accurate estimates and early warning of future attacks. But they worry that Betts is too forgiving. Indulging in the view that failure is inevitable can absolve the intelligence community of serious shortcomings. As Russell puts it, "his argument that intelligence failures are inevitable can be too easily used as a shield to protect downright negligent strategic intelligence performances." For instance, Betts argues that the flawed conclusions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were reasonable given the paucity of available evidence. To Russell, this obscures the bigger point: the U.S. intelligence community focused on Iraq for more than a decade without being able to uncover useful data about its WMD program. This failure of collection was compounded by "shoddy analysis," and the result was a series of overly confident intelligence estimates that were based on extremely flimsy information. 

The other side of the coin is that focusing on failure makes it hard to understand the success stories. There is no reason to let intelligence agencies off the hook if they have demonstrated the ability to succeed in difficult situations, and Dahl notes that several recent terrorist plots have been foiled partly because of effective intelligence work. A better understanding of the prospects and limits of intelligence requires looking beyond familiar failures like Barbarossa, the Yom Kippur War, and the sudden fall of the Shah. There may not be perfect solutions for the inherent enemies of intelligence, but there are ways of managing the problem. 

Turning from the related issues of failure and surprise attack, Glenn Hastedt addresses the question of how policymakers use intelligence. Scholars have traditionally focused on intelligence producers while giving short shrift to the behavior of intelligence consumers. But intelligence only matters inasmuch as it affects policy decisions; even perfect intelligence products are useless if they do not find a receptive audience. 


In Enemies of Intelligence, Betts revisits a longstanding debate on the appropriate relationship between leaders and intelligence officials. On one side are those who seek to insulate intelligence from policymakers so that they are not infected with policy biases. On the other side are those who argue that insulating intelligence from the policy process makes it irrelevant to decisions about national security. Betts has previously leaned in the direction of relevance over pure objectivity, but admits to some doubt given the controversy over prewar intelligence on Iraq. 

Hastedt identifies a different kind of tension lurking just under the surface of this discussion: whether it is possible for intelligence to remain objective in a democracy. Hastedt notes that preserving the analytical integrity of intelligence estimates is difficult because policymakers are strongly tempted to use intelligence in bureaucratic battles and public debates. Unfortunately, the public presentation of intelligence is usually stripped of nuance because policymakers cannot afford to hedge when they are trying to mobilize support for their plans. The incentives to politicize intelligence are thus built into the structure of the policy process. 

Going public might make it impossible for intelligence agencies to remain independent of political considerations. Intelligence estimates offer conditional forecasts and usually do not include point predictions about future events. The reason is that information is ambiguous and international politics are uncertain. Recognizing these truths is fine as long as intelligence estimates are not used as political footballs in public or bureaucratic fights. The increasing use of intelligence in public, however, may force intelligence officers to make firmer conclusions than the evidence allows. If this is correct, then politicization has less to do with the interaction between leaders and intelligence officials than with the nature of contemporary policymaking. 

The idea that September 11 marked a significant change in world politics has become commonplace in discussions of intelligence and national security. But did 9/11 really change everything? The answer has important implications for debates over the future of intelligence. Reform advocates warn against complacency in an era of change, where rogue states and terrorists have replaced great powers as the main threats to U.S. security. Skeptics warn against overreaction. Unsurprisingly, the question is the subject of debate among the participants in this roundtable. Betts argues that intelligence in the Cold War faced more straightforward challenges. The main target was a nation-state instead of a shadowy network of non-state actors, and important questions like the disposition of Soviet strategic forces could be answered with advanced technological collection assets like imagery satellites. Dahl agrees, noting that success against modern threats will require prosaic solutions (e.g. better cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement) rather than exotic technologies. On the other hand, Hastedt argues that Betts is too nostalgic for what he calls th e

Betts' answer is more complicated, however. He recognizes the emergence of new threats like al Qaeda, but he also emphasizes that some problems are inherent and unchanging. This informs his view of the appropriateness of different kinds of intelligence reform. The rise of non-state threats requires changes in how intelligence agencies are allowed to operate. For example, Betts provocatively argues that the United States ought to set "priorities among liberties" when considering the balance between the need for domestic intelligence and the personal right to privacy (162-168). He rejects the choice between security and liberty as a false dichotomy, arguing instead that expanded domestic surveillance is permissible as long as the principle of due process is strengthened. The legal consequences of this argument are profound because, as Betts notes, there is no "hierarchy of liberties" in the Constitution. But the seriousness of the threat means that Congress and the courts need to think proactively about how to best maintain civil liberties while also improving intelligence collection. Failure to do so could lead to a situation in which individual rights are jettisoned in the aftermath of another attack. 

But while some things have changed, Betts argues that most things have not. The inherent enemies of intelligence are not sensitive to changes in international politics. Psychological shortcomings and ambiguous data will inhibit intelligence regardless of whether the threats are from great powers or transnational terrorists. Betts' attention to the inherent enemies causes him to warn against radical efforts to reorganize the intelligence community. 

The question of continuity and change is also related to Betts' distinction between "normal theory" and "exceptional thinking" (53-65). Normal theory involves the accumulation of knowledge that generates predictions about "golden age of intelligence." Estimates of the Soviet Union were consistently plagued with uncertainty. Without the benefit of hindsight, the mysteries about Soviet intentions were no less perplexing than the mysteries about al Qaeda or Iran.  adversaries' expected behavior. Intelligence agencies cultivate institutional methods of predicting the most likely course of events in any given place, based on specific assumptions about adversaries' intentions and general theories about international politics. Normal theory is a necessary precaution against pure speculation and unchecked fantasizing about nightmare scenarios that lead to irrational and counterproductive policy responses. 

The problem is that unusual events, however unlikely, can have catastrophic consequences for the unprepared. Events that are outside the parameters of normal theory are unlikely to be predicted by analysts working in the confines of the intelligence community. Nonexpert observers are more open to the possibility of anomalies, possessing the kind of exceptional  thinking that may alert policymakers to looming dangers. The difficulty for intelligence community is cultivating the right balance between normal and exceptional thinking; that is, to make the most of the accumulated wisdom of professional analysts without falling victim to bureaucratic inertia and intellectual sclerosis. 

Enemies of Intelligence is chock full of both kinds of thinking. Betts' theories on intelligence are informed by a long study of dip lomatic and military history, but the book also offers fresh ideas on new > dilemmas. Careful theorizing and historical analysis have been conspicuously > absent from public controversies over intelligence since the September 1 attacks. Betts' book, as well as the following commentaries, injects some badly needed sobriety into the debate.  
 Participants: 

Richard K. Betts (Ph.D., Harvard, 1975) is a specialist on national security policy and military strategy. He is director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Betts was a Senior Fellow and Research Associate at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC from 1976-1990, and has taught at Harvard University and the Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to numerous journal articles in International Security, World Politics, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere he has published Military Readiness (Brookings, 1995); Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, 2nd edition (Columbia University Press, 1991); Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Brookings, 1987); and Surprise Attack (Brookings, 1982). He has also coauthored or edited three other books, including The Irony of Vietnam (Brookings, 1979), which won the Woodrow Wilson Prize; and Conflict after the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace (Pearson Education, 2005) 

 Erik J. Dahl received his Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Tufts University, and was until August 2008 a research fellow at the Belfer Center of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In September 2008, he will join the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School as an assistant professor of national security affairs. He retired from the U.S. Navy in 2002 after serving 21 years as an intelligence officer, and from 1999 to 2002 he served on the faculty of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. In addition to his Ph.D. and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, he holds master's degrees from the London School of Economics and the Naval War College. His work has been published in The Journal of Strategic Studies, the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Joint Force Quarterly, Defence Studies, and The Naval War College Review. He is currently working on a study of unsuccessful terrorist plots against Americans during the past twenty years. 

Glenn Hastedt received his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University. He is professor and chair of the justice Studies Department at James Madison University, prior to that he was professor and chair of the political science department. He is the author of American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, Future, 7th edition (Pearson Prentice Hall 2008). He has edited two books on intelligence, Controlling Intelligence (Frank Cass, 1991) and Intelligence Analysis and Assessment (co-editor, Frank Cass, 1996). His most recent articles on intelligence include "Foreign Policy by Commission: Reforming the Intelligence Community," Intelligence and National Security, (2007), "Public Intelligence: Leaks as Policy Instruments," Intelligence and National Security (2005 and "Estimating Intentions in an Age of Terrorism: Garthoff Revisited," Defense Intelligence Journal (2005).  

Joshua Rovner received his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 2008. He is currently the Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Leadership Studies and Political Science at Williams College, where he teaches courses on international security and American foreign policy. His dissertation, "Intelligence-Policy Relations and the Problem of Politicization," won the Lucian Pye Award for best thesis in political science at MIT. He has published in International Security, The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Strategic Insights, and The Boston Globe 

Richard L. Russell holds a Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and is a member of the International Institute for strategic studies. He is Professor of National Security Affairs at the National Defense University's Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. He also holds appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program and Research Associate in the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Russell has published widely the fields of international relations, American foreign policy, security studies, intelligence, > and Middle Eastern security. Russell is the author of three books: Sharpening Strategic Intelligence: Why the CIA Gets It Wrong and What Needs to be Done to Get It Right (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East: Strategic Contest (Routledge, 2005); and George F. Kennan's Strategic Thought: The Making of an American Political Realist (Praeger, 1999). 

Review by Erik Dahl, Naval Postgraduate School/Harvard Kennedy School of Government 

Richard Betts is arguably America's foremost scholar of intelligence, and in his excellent new book, Enemies of Intelligence, he offers reflections based on three decades of studying intelligence failures and the role of intelligence in national security. A number of the book's chapters > are revisions of earlier works, including his classic 1978 World Politics article in which he first laid out his case for the inevitability of intelligence failure.1 Roughly half the book is new, however, and while the book reads in spots more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole, it nonetheless represents a valuable overview of the key issues facing American intelligence today. 

His typology of "enemies of intelligence," introduced in chapter 1, is somewhat useful: outside enemies (foreign adversaries), innocent enemies (such as intelligence professionals or policy makers who fail to produce or use intelligence effectively), and inherent enemies (such as natural human cognitive limitations and organizational constraints). But I found the title to be a bit of a red herring, because Betts quickly dispenses with the first two sets of enemies, and for most of the book focuses on the third set of inherent enemies, which he argues are the most difficult to overcome. A more tightly organized book might have maintained the "enemies" theme throughout, examining each type in turn, looking in more detail at questions such as how today's outside enemies-primarily terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, but also nation states like Iran and China-compare with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 

The real primary focus of the book-familiar to readers of Betts's other works on intelligence-is on the limitations of what intelligence can do. Betts argues that politicians and pundits who expect the intelligence community to do a significantly better job than it has in the past are likely to be disappointed. The best we can hope for, in his view, are "limited but meaningful improvements" in intelligence performance (184). As have a number of other scholars of intelligence, Betts writes that improving intelligence is similar to increasing a baseball player's batting average-marginal improvements can be possible, but in the end, even the best player will strike out much of the time. Betts calls this a "tragic view" of intelligence failure, and repeats a phrase of his that has been widely quoted: "intelligence failures are not only inevitable, they are natural" (51). 

At the same time, Betts makes what might seem to be a contrary argument: that even though failures are inevitable, the U.S. intelligence community has actually done a pretty good job in recent years. He acknowledges that Intelligence agencies failed to predict the 9/11 attacks and erred in estimating the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction > programs, but he sees both as understandable and excusable mistakes. Before 9/11, he writes, the intelligence community had provided a considerable amount of long-range, strategic warning on the threat from al Qaeda. What it couldn't produce was tactical, specific warning of the plot being developed-but that, he believes, was not surprising, because such tactical warning is almost never available. And even if more intelligence had been collected-and more dots connected-the added information might just have resulted in more noise, drowning out whatever meaningful data there was. 

Similarly, Betts lets the intelligence community off easy when it comes to the issue of Iraq's WMD. At first glance he seems to be harshly critical of intelligence, calling the episode "the worst intelligence failure since the founding of the modern intelligence community" (114). But he goes on to explain that the mistaken intelligence estimate was not itself an egregious failure, because it was the right estimate to have made based on the intelligence available. The real failure, in Betts's view, was in two different effects that the mistaken intelligence estimate had on American society and policy. First, it tarnished the credibility of the intelligence community, distracting attention from the otherwise good work done by American intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Second and more importantly, the mistaken WMD estimate "provided the warrant for war against Iraq, a war that was unnecessary and that cost far more blood and treasure than the September 11 attacks" (115). 

I have relatively minor quibbles about two incidents Betts recounts in the book. In the first, he relates the often-told story about how on September 10, 2001, the National Security Agency intercepted messages that appeared to discuss the upcoming attacks-but it didn't get around to translating them until September 12 (107). Betts rightly notes that because these messages were unspecific, they would not have made much difference even if they had been translated more quickly. But he should have pointed out that the staff of the 9/11 Commission dete rmined that those communications had probably referred not to the 9/11 attacks, but to the opening of a Taliban and al Qaeda military offensive in Afghanistan at about the same time.2 

The second incident has practically achieved the status of an urban legend. Numerous authorities, including the 9/11 Commission, President Bush, and now Betts in this book, have reported that as a result of leaks in the Washington Times in 1998, Osama bin Laden learned the U.S. was monitoring his satellite phone calls (181). Not surprisingly-or so the story goes-bin Laden immediately stopped using that phone, and the U.S. lost a crucial source of intelligence that could possibly have led to his capture and the prevention of the 9/11 attacks. The problem is that the story may well be false. Although Betts notes in an endnote that the Washington Times has disputed the story, it would have been appropriate to mention that others have challenged the story as well, arguing that bin Laden's satellite phone usage had been described in media accounts dating back to 1996 and that it is quite possible he decided to adopt a lower profile in August 1998 because the U.S. had just tried to kill him with cruise missiles.3 

My own view is that Betts is more right than wrong in his key point about the inevitability of intelligence failure, but I have two major concerns about the book. The first is that he is too easy on the intelligence community. Acknowledging that some intelligence failures are inevitable does not mean that intelligence agencies and officials should be  given a pass when they screw up. Betts writes so clearly, and he appears to dismiss his critics so casually, that a reader might easily come away from the book believing that what he calls his "charitable view of intelligence" is the last word on the matter among serious students of intelligence. He tells us, in fact, that his view "is widely accepted among the small > corps of scholars who have studied cases of failure, but not among politicians or the public" (27). 

While it is true that many prominent scholars do share Betts's charitable view toward intelligence,4 others are much more critical of the American intelligence community and offer prescriptions quite different from that offered by Betts. Such alternative views can be found in the work of two other scholars whose recent books cover much the same ground as Enemies of Intelligence, but which take a very different perspective. Amy B. Zegart focuses on organizational and bureaucratic limitations on intelligence, and her Spying Blind is a harsh critique of the CIA and FBI for failing to adapt to the growing threat of terrorism despite numerous blue-ribbon commissions and studies before 9/11 that warned of the danger.5 Richard L. Russell, on the other hand, in Sharpening Strategic Intelligence, emphasizes the failures of the CIA to produce high quality human intelligence and strategic analysis.6 It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine who might be wrong and who might be right in this debate. But my point is that there is a debate underway among serious students of intelligence over the causes of, and possible remedies for, intelligence failure-a debate Betts only briefly acknowledges.7 

My second concern is a broader one, about what I believe Enemies of Intelligence says about the state of intelligence studies and in particular the study of intelligence warning and failure today. I found the book mildly depressing-not simply because intelligence failure cannot be helped, but because it appears that the study of intelligence failure has > n ot come very far in the 30 years since Betts began writing about it. As Betts describes, a rather large literature has developed dating back to the Cold War on the topic of intelligence failure and strategic surprise, so much so that the question of why intelligence fails might be called "overdetermined" (22). What is lacking, however, is a theory of why and when intelligence succeeds. Betts does describe a number of cases in which intelligence agencies have successfully warned of approaching dangers, but these are cited mostly to support his argument that "intelligence often does its job 
quite well" (190), and Betts does not attempt to analyze these cases in depth or draw conclusions from them. 

I believe it is time to take a new look at the question of intelligence success. Studying success is difficult: As Betts observes, intelligence successes are less well publicized than failures, and it can often be difficult to determine whether a particular incident should count as a success or failure. The U.S. intelligence community does not appear to keep close track of its own successes, and what it does know it does not like to talk about, because revealing successful intelligence operations could provide useful information to our nation's enemies. 

But intelligence successes, in the form of failed terrorist plots, are already a part of the national discourse on terrorism. The administration frequently cites failed plots as evidence that the terrorist threat is real and its counterterrorism programs are effective. For example, in his State of the Union address in January 2007, President Bush described several prevented attacks, and said that "Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen."8 As Betts notes, in October 2005 the White House released a list of ten "serious al-Qaeda terrorist plots" that had been disrupted since September 11, 2001, along with five additional efforts by al Qaeda to case targets in the U.S. or infiltrate operatives into the country.9 Administration critics, on the other hand, argue that the cases cited by the government amount to little more than a molehill. And some scholars believe that the absence of successful terrorist attacks since 9/11 indicates there are few terrorists in the United States and the threat of international terrorist attacks against the U.S. is very low.10  
 Despite the difficulty of studying unsuccessful terrorist attacks, reliable information is available on enough cases to suggest that terrorist plots fail-which means that intelligence and security officials succeed more often than many might realize. Three prominent examples are:  

The New York City "Day of Terror" Plot. This plot, which was disrupted soon after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, is still one of the most important thwarted attacks in American history, but it is little remembered today. A group of Islamist extremists planned to bomb a number of New York City landmarks including the UN Headquarters, the Manhattan Federal Building, and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. The FBI had an informant among the plotters, and the men were arrested at a safehouse in Queens while they were mixing fuel and fertilizer in 55-gallon steel drums. 

The Lackawanna Six. The case of these Yemeni-Americans, who traveled to Afghanistan in the Spring of 2001 to attend an al Qaeda training camp and met with Osama bin Laden, has been described by many observers as an example of government overkill. Most of the men appear to have turned away from violence after 9/11, and they were not actively plotting any attacks when they were arrested. But the group had clear links to senior al Qaeda leaders, and the case is instructive as an example of how a wide range of intelligence sources can be useful to authorities: the group first came to the attention of the FBI through an anonymous tip, and later information came from intercepted emails and from a detainee captured in Afghanistan. 

The Fort Dix Plot. This more recent case typifies the sort of plots seen today and the variety of methods authorities are using to disrupt them. Six men described as Islamic militants were arrested in May 2007 and charged with plotting to attack the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey and "kill as many soldiers as possible." The men took part in paramilitary training together and conducted surveillance of Fort Dix and other military installations, but authorities were tipped off by a store clerk who became concerned when they brought in a video to be converted to DVD-and on the video they could be seen firing weapons while calling for jihad. The FBI eventually placed two different informants in the group, and watched for 15 months before arresting them when they attempted to buy AK-47 and M-16 machine guns. 

Despite Betts's argument that the business of intelligence has not changed fundamentally in recent decades (6), these few examples of thwarted terrorist plots suggest that there may in fact be something new about intelligence failure and success today against the problem of terrorism, compared with the challenges intelligence faced during the Cold War. Especially at the domestic level, intelligence and law enforcement officials appear to be successful in providing tactical warning of terrorist plots. It is this kind of warning that most experts, including Betts, tell us is not to be expected, and without which policy makers are left having to rely on broader, strategic-level warnings that often confuse as much as they enlighten. 

More study is needed before we will be able to draw firm conclusions about the future of American intelligence in the war on terrorism. These cases of failed plots do, however, suggest that the study of surprise attack and intelligence failure is at least as relevant today as it was during the Cold War when Professor Betts wrote his early, pioneering work. As Betts argues, intelligence can never be perfect, and some failures are inevitable. We may never be able to get completely past the "tragic view of intelligence failure" so eloquently described here by Betts. But in this age of mass-casualty terrorism, it seems clear that we need to try. The good news is that by studying cases of failed terrorist plots we may be able to learn something new about intelligence success, both to advance intelligence scholarship and (much more importantly) to offer new ideas for policy. 

 Notes  
1 "Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable." World Politics 31:1 (October 1978). 

2 9/11 Commission Staff Statement Number 11, "The Performance of the Intelligence Community," 9. Available at 
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/> staff_statement_11.pdf. 

3 Glenn Kessler, "File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths,'" The Washington Post, 22 December, 2005. The leak about bin Laden's phone habits has also been described as occurring during public testimony in either the trial of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, or of the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombers, but neither of those scenarios is convincing. See Richard B. Zabel and James J. Benjamin Jr., In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts. Human Rights First White Paper, May 2008, pp. 88-89, at http:/ / www.humanrightsfirst.org/. 

4 See for example, Richards L. Heuer Jr., "Limits of Intelligence Analysis," Orbis 49:1 (Winter 2005), and Robert Jervis, "Reports, Politics, and Intelligence Failures: The Case of Iraq," The Journal of Strategic Studies 29:1 (February 2006). For a more recent expression of a similar view, see Mark M. Lowenthal, "The Real Intelligence Failure? Spineless 
Spies," The Washington Post, 25 May, 2008, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/ AR2008052202 961.html. 

5 Amy B. Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).  

6 Richard L. Russell, Sharpening Strategic Intelligence: Why the CIA Gets it Wrong, and What Needs to be Done to Get it Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 

7 Betts does note Zegart's criticism of the intelligence community for failing to adopt organizational and other reforms, but he argues that reorganizations tend to lead to significant disruption, and often cause new problems even as they fix old ones (144). 

8 State of the Union Address, January 23, 2007, transcript as provided by the New York Times, 24 January, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/washington/23bush-transcript.html. 

9 The White House, "Fact Sheet: Plots, Casings, and Infiltrations Referenced in President Bush's Remarks on the War on Terror," 6 October, 2005. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051006-7.html. 

10 See for example, John Mueller, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?" Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006, and his Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006).


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## archade (Jul 28, 2008)

Richard K. Betts. Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, September 2007. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13888-8.


Review by Glenn Hastedt, James Madison University 

In Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security Richard K. Betts builds upon insights from his previously published work on intelligence policy and adds new reflections on the complicated relationship between intelligence analysts and policy makers and the ever controversial question of why intelligence failures happen. Betts remains true to the positions he laid out in his earlier accounts of strategic surprise, "Analysis, War, and Decision" and Surprise Attack, which together have served as the starting point for thinking about problems of strategic surprise and intelligence failures for all who have since taken up the subject.1 

Now, as then, Betts asserts that "intelligence failures are not only inevitable, they are natural" (51). The root causes are many, ranging from the basic nature of world politics to cognitive and perceptual limitations by analysts, and including attempts at deception by the enemy and the enemy's own uncertainty over how to proceed in between. Betts also remains skeptical about the potential for radical organizational solutions to produce significant improvements in our ability to prevent intelligence failures regardless of whether they are structural or norm oriented in focus. Still, Betts is not resigned to accepting all intelligence failures as inevitable. He advocates "limited changes based on realistic foundations" (3) as a means of improving the quality of intelligence work at the margins. The attainable goal in intelligence work is to improve one's batting average thereby lessening the frequency and intensity of surprise and not to eliminate all surprise (187). 

Betts further adds to our understanding of intelligence failures in this work by examining the 9/11 and Iraq WMD intelligence failures. He also tackles the important question of the relationship between civil liberties and intelligence. Particularly intriguing is his identification of three types of enemies of intelligence (8-14). Most recognizable are outside enemies, governments and groups with whom the United States is in conflict. These are the traditional enemies of intelligence. The second group of enemies he labels as innocent enemies. They typically are the targets of critics after surprise has occurred but according to Betts are less important than the amount of attention focused on them would suggest. They consist of individual intelligence officers, the leadership of the intelligence community, and policymakers. The third group of enemies of intelligence grows "out of the human condition and the dynamics of the intelligence function itself" (p.12). They are the inherent enemies of intelligence and addressing them must be done in the context of a dialectical process rather than a linear one. 

In reflecting on Betts' considerable insights on intelligence failures and the problem of strategic surprise, I believe we can identify three areas of inquiry, which current and future students of intelligence might profitably examine or reexamine. The first is the nature of Cold War surprise versus surprise today. Regardless of how the contemporary era is defined whether it be as the post Cold War period, the age of globalization, or Long War against terrorism -- the popular view is that this period is different from the one that preceded it. Betts suggests that this is at least true for intelligence noting that "compared with today, the last three decades of the Cold War was a golden age of intelligence" (p. 7). Gregory Treverton captures the perceived distinction between these two periods nicely by describing the Cold War as a period where intelligence services sought to solve puzzles and the current era is one dominated by mysteries.2 Puzzles have solutions. One needs only to find the correct missing piece. Mysteries lack any such defining structure or clear end point. I wonder if this distinction between intelligence analysis during the Cold War and today and by extension the nature of intelligence failures then and now is not overstated. It is certainly true that puzzles, especially those surrounding the military capabilities of the Soviet Union were a preeminent > concern of the U.S. intelligence community, but there were also many mysteries. Reading now-public Cold War national intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union and China I am struck by 1) how much analysts were guessing at regarding intentions and motivating forces and 2) how unlikely it was that they would ever really know. The existence of strong similarities between these two periods would seem to hold at least two policy implications. First, it would suggest that we need to go back and see how it was we tried to solve the intelligence mysteries of the Cold War with an eye toward identifying best practices for tackling today's mysteries. Second, it would seem to signal caution regarding expectations that technology or open source intelligence will bring about a significant improvement in the intelligence community's batting average. Advances in technology and additional access to published material from communist states did not solve Cold War mysteries. They may not solve today's mysteries either.

A second area of further inquiry involves one of Betts' innocent enemies of intelligence: policy makers. Students and practitioners of intelligence from Sherman Kent forward have written about how intelligence analysts and policy makers come from two different cultures and have differing views of the intelligence function. Moreover, all agree that intelligence does not dictate policy. Policy makers are free not to accept the intelligence they are given and have a responsibility to weigh intelligence against other interests, concerns, and pressures in making decisions.3 Understandably, the focus of intelligence failures and studies of strategic surprise has been on the organization and operation of the intelligence community along with the values and attitudes of intelligence analysts. Enemies of Intelligence falls comfortably into this genre although Betts does address policy maker attitudes and actions throughout the book. Policy makers, the consumers of intelligence, have received far less systematic attention in the literature. Correcting this deficiency is no easy task. We need look no further than the study of civil-military relations in which policy makers and military professionals are defined at the outset as co-equals. Most studies focus far more heavily on the organization of the military and the attitudes of professional soldiers than on their civilian counterparts. 

A greater focus on policy makers (congressional, presidential, and bureaucratic) in the civil-intelligence equation offers two > advantages for future studies. First, it helps clarify and place limits on the concept of politicalization of intelligence. Betts notes that depending upon how it is defined the politicalization of intelligence can be seen as inevitable or corrupting (p.74). I would suggest that politicalization is a natural part of the intelligence process in the evaluation of information, the construction of estimates, and their reception by policy makers. It is rooted in the underlying reality that information is not self interpreting. What we tend to view as corruption is a phenomenon more accurately associated with the publicization of intelligence. Publicizing intelligence is the result of the differing environments in which policy makers and analysts operate. Where both policy makers and analysts need to build winning coalitions for their interpretations of events under conditions of uncertainty policy makes also need to sell their policies. "Secret" intelligence is a valuable tool for gaining allies, disarming opponents and changing the overall political climate in which policy is made and implemented but its full impact is only achieved by going public. Second, a focus on policy makers going public with intelligence would reveal that this is not a new phenomenon nor is it haphazardly done. Patterns exist. Intelligence has "gone public" in four different ways depending upon whether the issue at hand is a single isolated problem or a reoccurring and ongoing policy issue, and whether or not the intelligence is contested.4 

An attention to policy makers and their frequent public use of intelligence raises the issue of whether we might best consider policy makers to be an inherent enemy of intelligence instead of an innocent enemy. The case for doing so rests on the fact that the publicization of intelligence is strongly rooted in the need to build support for policies. The conditions that generate this need appear to be growing: intensified legislative-executive conflicts, the lack of a foreign policy consensus among elites or the public at large, and the advent of 24/7 media coverage of events that emphasizes instant analysis of breaking news. The case against such a reinterpretation is the argument that viewing > intelligence analysts and policy makers as inherent enemies not only miscasts the relationship between them but runs the risk of creating a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. 

The third extension of Betts' treatment of intelligence grows out of the above discussion. If the publicization of intelligence is not haphazard, accidental, or rare but rather a patterned and reoccurring phenomenon, what is the relationship between secret intelligence and public intelligence? Is public intelligence an enemy of secret intelligence or can they coexist peacefully? If it is an enemy of secret intelligence is it an external, innocent or inherent enemy? Public and secret intelligence differ greatly in their fundamental qualities. Going back to the early years of intelligence we find the 1955 Hoover Commission defining intelligence as "dealing with all things which should be known in advance of initiating a course of action." DCI Admiral William Rayborn defined intelligence as information which has been carefully evaluated as to its accuracy and significance.5 Public intelligence lacks these qualities. It is incomplete and lacks nuance and context. It is action prompting and presented with an oracle quality. It is accusatory; there is always a guilty party. Secret intelligence achieves its goals not by solving problems but by its ability to shape and move the public debate over what policy to adopt. 

Over time it would seem reasonable to speculate that public intelligence might undermine the effectiveness of secret intelligence thereby  increasing the possibility of intelligence failures. It could do so by increasing the tendency for black and white or worst case thinking among policy makers, making it more difficult to achieve consensus by raising the stakes over issues, and calling into question the credibility and competence of individuals and organizations involved in the production of intelligence. Finally, it might, as Betts fears, lead to the adoption of reform proposals that not only do not address the real causes of intelligence failures but make the problem worse.  
 Notes 

1 Richard K. Betts, "Analysis, War and Decision," World Politics 31 (1978), 61-89 and Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1982). 

2 Gregory Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11-13. 

3 On this point see Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 202-206.

4 Glenn Hastedt, "Public Intelligence: Leaks as Policy Instruments, Intelligence and National Security 20 (2005), 419-439. 

5 Both statements can be found in Harry Howe Ransom, The Intelligence Establishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 7. 

Review by Richard L. Russell, National Defense University and Georgetown University 

 Richard Betts has produced a wonderful book for taking a step back from the rush of sound bites and screaming that poses as informed debate on media airwaves these days to give an historical, thoughtful, and insightful analysis of the uses and limitations in intelligence for informing American national security policy. Unlike most media talking-heads who have no legitimate claims to the title "expert," Betts is a superb scholar who has thought long and hard about intelligence over the course of some three decades. 

Betts too is unique because he is a scholar with empathy for the crushing responsibilities, workloads, and burdens carried by policy makers and intelligence officers. He strives to lend a scholarly hand to help policymakers and intelligence officials do their jobs better at a time in which most of the academy in the international relations field labors to develop theories which are too often intellectually impenetrable as well as irrelevant to the demands of harried practitioners. As Betts himself wisely notes, the marrying of policy analysis and theoretical work "is out of fashion in contemporary political science, but I continue to believe that separating study-based theory from experienced-based policy analysis impoverishes both." (xii) 

Betts tells readers upfront that he is a Democrat (xv), but his philosophy is conservative. Much like the great conservative thinker Edmund Burke, who warned of the violence that the French Revolution was to unleash contrary to lofty liberal philosophic expectations, Betts warns of the dangers of revolution in today's intelligence community. Betts is a true American patriot in the best sense of the word and wants to strengthen American strategic intelligence capabilities to better defend the nation, but he is a dogged realist who knows the pitfalls and dangers of overly optimistic liberal reform agendas. By his account, "Limited improvements based on realistic foundations are better than revolutionary changes that founder or make things worse." (3) 

 Betts insightfully lays out the causes of intelligence failure, which he calls "enemies of intelligence." He puts the enemies into three sets. The first set is "outside enemies" who are in conflict with the United States and want to conceal their intentions, capabilities, and vulnerabilities. The second set Betts calls "innocent enemies" because they unintentionally threaten American intelligence and include negligent intelligence professionals, myopic leadership, and bureaucratic turf battles. And the third set is "inherent enemies" which stem from the fallen nature of man such as his mental limitations, dilemmas, and trade-offs that block accurate intelligence assessments and judgments. (8-12) 

This book bucks a common reformers' mindset that picking just the right institutional structures and bureaucratic alignments would bypass these "enemies" and eliminate strategic intelligence failures. Betts soberly argued that failures will always happen in his landmark 1978 World Politics article "Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable" and he holds firm to that argument in this book. Indeed, the intervening years since that article's publication have proven Betts right with a slew of American strategic intelligence failures: being blindsided by the Iranian revolution; underestimating and overestimating Iraqi WMD in the run ups to the 1990 and 2003 wars, respectively; failing to > accurately gauge North Korea's nuclear weapons inventory; and missing India's nuclear weapons testing to tick off just a few cases. 

Betts's analysis is empirically sound, but his argument that intelligence failures are inevitable can be too easily used as a shield to protect downright negligent strategic intelligence performances. Betts likes baseball analogies, so let us indulge in one here. A baseball player who has a lifetime batting average of .375 can argue that striking out is an inevitable part of the game, just as a player with a lifetime batting average of .180. Both players are empirically right, but the player with the .375 average might well be on the way to the Hall of Fame while the player with the .180 should be on his way to the Minor Leagues. Betts' argument does not help to distinguish between Hall of Fame- and Minor League-like strategic intelligence performances. 

Illustrative of this distinction problem is the Iraq WMD controversy. Betts judges of that performance that "Although the bottom line analytic conclusion was wrong, in the absence of adequate collection it was the proper estimate to make from the evidence then available." [italics in original]" (115) That may well be technically true, but it is as irrelevant as spring season batting averages. Regardless of whether or not going to war against Iraq was a strategically sound decision, the American intelligence community assessed in the run up to the 2003 war that Saddam's Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and had active biological and chemical warfare programs and weapons. All of these strategic intelligence judgments were wrong and post-war investigation revealed that Saddam had disbanded his WMD programs eight years before the 2003 war. 

The American intelligence community, in other words, had missed-due to slim or no human intelligence and shoddy analysis, both of which are core CIA responsibilities--a strategic change of direction in the behavior of one of the United States's most serious foes for almost a decade. One wonders if the intelligence community today suffers from a substantial time lag in gauging the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program, which the intelligence community assessed in a National Intelligence Estimate as being halted in 2003. The CIA performance in Iraq was much like a hitter who could not hit a curve ball to save his life and who should be dispatched to the minor league until he fixes his batting. Indeed, that is what has happened to the CIA; it has been demoted with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence to lead the intelligence community. The challenge today is how to get the analytic talent in the DNI's office to think about strategic intelligence issues and how to compel the CIA to adopt better human intelligence business practices, both tasks that the bowels of the CIA have persistently been unable to do. 

This selected criticism should not overshadow a larger point. Betts's book is loaded with practical scholarly wisdom for policymakers, intelligence officials, legislators, citizens, and scholars, which was in short supply in Washington as it crafted the 2004 intelligence reforms. This book should be a guiding light for any further reforms of the intelligence community under the DNI's auspices. As Betts sagely observes, "If the public expects a shake-up of hidebound intelligence organizations, it will take presidential muscle, applied unrelentingly through a trusted manager for the intelligence system, to make it happen." (139) The next president and his national security lieutenants should take Professor Betts's sagely analysis to heart. 

Author's Response by Richard K. Betts 

I am grateful for the selection of my book for an H-Diplo > Roundtable, and grateful to the three reviewers for their kind words and restrained criticisms. 

Erik Dahl and Richard Russell take me mildly to task for being too easy on intelligence professionals' mistakes. I am acutely aware that my forgiving view strikes many as tolerance for bad work. My view also does not lend itself to an exciting, iconoclastic argument likely to draw enthusiastic readership - except perhaps among intelligence personnel who see it as excusing them. My conservative argument would not be my preference; I would rather be able to attach my name to a critique that yields more of a solution to an important set of problems. Nevertheless, my studies and thought over the years have ineluctably left me with the tragic view. In the absence of systematic and unambiguous data on the ratio of successes to failures, or the quality of performance afforded by available or obtainable information in particular cases, this is necessarily a subjective judgment. It is quite reasonable to find the argument depressing, as Dahl does, but I persist in seeing the glass as half-full. 

Those who believe I am too undemanding can point to opportunities for correct judgment that were lost in cases of failure. Sometimes these are egregious, but I think that more often they seem so only because hindsight obscures the difficulties. If we held ourselves as scholars to the same standards of judgment or acceptable error rate in our own forecasts or research that the harshest critics of intelligence apply to the intelligence community, most of us would be toast. Of course in practice some professions are held to higher standards than others - physicians, airline pilots, nuclear power plant technicians - because their mistakes, unlike those of scholars, cost lives. Intelligence professionals fall in this category. But the fact that a lower error rate than is typical for most professions is demanded of one set of human beings does not explain why or how it can be expected.

Of course harsh criticism of intelligence performance is easily warranted if that performance is notably worse than the norm in other lines of work. I don't know how to measure comparative performance well enough for confident judgment, but my impression from studying numerous cases is that the intelligence batting average is no worse than for other jobs that face human adversaries who are trying craftily to mislead and outwit them (what I call the "outside enemies" in my book). 

Russell thinks my analogy of analytical performance to a batting average "does not help to distinguish between Hall of Fame and Minor League like strategic intelligence performances," but pages 185-187 of my book try to make the same point as Russell does about sending poor performers to the minors. The limitation of the analogy is that there is no reliable way to compute a precise batting average in intelligence work. Intelligence managers have to make the same sorts of subjective judgments about the quality of their staffs' work as an academic committee that denies tenure or a research prize committee that makes an award. 

Russell illustrates his less forgiving verdict with a discussion of the mistaken 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I am not sure that we are really far apart on this case. My charitable argument was that the NIE's conclusion was reasonable given the evidence available ("wrong for the right reasons"). It is quite reasonable to assert, however, that the available evidence should have been more substantial -- that the intelligence community should have been able to do a better job of collection. As one high-ranking official put it in conversation, "The shocking thing wasn't that the books were cooked, but that there was so little in the books." As I also argued on page 122 of the book, the NIE's Key Judgments could and should have been written differently to highlight the fact that the conclusion was based almost entirely on deduction and logic rather than reliable direct evidence. 

Dahl believes that I exaggerate the academic consensus in favor of the charitable view that frequent failures are inevitable. Perhaps. In that passage I was referring to past scholarship on surprise attacks. Ariel Levite, a critic of this view and of my ideas, described the fatalistic view as the orthodox school of thought on the subject.1 But some of the critics who are less charitable, such as Russell, cover a broader range of intelligence failures. In any case Dahl is right that the current debate includes many well argued sharp criticisms of the intelligence system. I am also glad to see that he echoes my recommendation to pay more attention to intelligence successes, and goes further than my cursory argument to outline a research agenda on that important issue. 

Dahl and Glenn Hastedt disagree on how different current intelligence challenges are from those of the Cold War. This leaves me comfortable with the argument in my first chapter that the answer is both: some important differences, but even more similarities. This is not an issue, however, on which anyone should get hung up. The only responsible intelligence strategy is one that is open in all directions, old and unprecedented. 

As I read him, Hastedt shares much of my view of the complex issue of politicization. I got the argument that publicity aggravates politicization from him in the first place, and my book does not develop it to the extent that he does in his comments here. I agree with most of what he says here, and he is bold to make the point since it contradicts the instincts of scholars (not to mention journalists) who thrive on openness and revelation of information. 

To me, this uncomfortable point is reinforced most vividly by the recent controversy over the NIE at the end of 2007 on Iran's nuclear weapons program. The Key Judgments (KJs) for the NIE were written after a policy decision to stop declassifying such summaries. As long as the KJs remained classified, and the readers were familiar with the issues relating to Iran's nuclear program, it was correct to put the conclusion about suspension of weapon design efforts at the beginning, because that was what was news. The facts that Iran continued to develop uranium enrichment and other capabilities applicable to a future weapon program which were discussed at length in the full estimate and noted at the end of the KJs - were common knowledge. 

The decision to keep the KJs classified, however, was reversed, which gave their packaging a different effect when they were put out in public. Controversy ensued because the emphasis on the point that Iran had suspended its weapon design program in 2003 was misleading when described in the media, led many observers to think mistakenly that the NIE said that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons option, and appeared to undermine counterproliferation efforts against Iran. Many in the public also did not realize that the media were not reporting on the full NIE (close to 100 pages, which remained classified, as distinct from the few telegraphic pages of KJs). Misunderstanding of the NIE could have been avoided if the public version of the KJs put the last one (which reminded that Iran retained the technical capacity "eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so") up front, and the first one (about suspension of the weapon design program) at the end. (This correct point was made by John Bolton in a bitter attack on the NIE.2 Yes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) 

More generally, revelation of intelligence analyses is undesirable because knowledge that the media and voting public will see them unavoidably politicizes the assessment process, which is already politically fraught, beyond repair. If estimates become grist for debate by pundits, legislators, and campaign advertisements, too much will ride on controversial intelligence judgments for policymakers, and the line operating department of State and Defense, to let an academic-style "objective" estimating process determine the outcome. 

Notes 


1 Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). For rebuttal see Richard K. Betts, "Surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy," International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (September 1989). 
2 John R. Bolton, "Our Politicized Intelligence Services," Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2008, p. A17. See also Robert Jervis, "Making Intelligence Public," Saltzman Research Note (Columbia University, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, April 2008.


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## archade (Jul 29, 2008)

E. Bruce Reynolds. Thailand's Secret War: OSS, SOE and the Free Thai Underground During World War II. Cambridge Military Histories Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xx + 462 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-521-83601-2.


Reviewed by: Phillip J. Ridderhof, U.S. Marine Corps, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Okinawa, Japan.


A Complex Proposition: Thailand and the Allies in World War II

Compared to the campaigns in the Pacific, the Southeast Asian campaigns of World War II have received limited attention in military history (the possible exception being the campaign in Burma). In his second book on the role of Thailand in the war, Dr. Reynolds has provided a well-written and fascinating addition to the relatively small body of scholarship in this area. Reynolds first book, Thailand and Japan's Southern Advance, 1940-1945 (1994), provided an account of the Thai-Japanese relationship in the war. In Thailand's Secret War, Reynolds discusses the other side of the Thai experience in World War II--the courting of and surreptitious cooperation with the Allies.

Prior to the war, Thailand had maintained its independence through a combination of adequate defense against regional aggressors in Burma and Indochina, and skillful diplomacy that played the colonial powers of France and Great Britain off one another and kept the great neighbor to the north, China, at bay. At the start of World War II, a primarily military government sensed the winds of change and succumbed to Japanese pressure in acceding to an alliance and allowing the Japanese to use Thailand as a base for operations against Burma. In exchange, the Japanese allowed the Thai to maintain their government and armed forces and supported them in achieving some of their regional territorial ambitions.

Almost immediately after the start of the war, however, certain factions of the Thai government and of the large Thai population overseas, which was primarily in western countries, lobbied for and began forming ties to Japan's enemies. While some in the Allied countries saw this as opportunism, it merely carried on the tradition of policy that had kept Thailand independent for the previous centuries. Against a backdrop of internal political friction between Thai military and civilian government leaders, Reynolds's research reveals that the outreach to the Allies was complicated by the widely different goals and perceptions of those countries: the United States, Great Britain and China.

The tangled web that Reynolds unravels is worthy of a good spy novel; there are myriad plots and sub-plots. In the largest sense, the Thai situation highlighted fundamental differences between the Allies regarding the future of Southeast Asia after the war. The British wanted to regain their colonial holdings and saw Thai cooperation with Japan as a direct challenge. They did not trust or want to cooperate with emissaries from the Thai government. The United States, on the other hand, perceived the Thai efforts much more positively. It saw the Thai outreach in terms of its potential to assist the war effort in China and Burma. For their part, the Nationalist Chinese saw the opportunity to use the large ethnic Chinese population in Thailand and the historic Chinese-Thai relationship to extend their influence after the war. Within the struggles among the Allies, were subordinate struggles within the individual Allied camps. U.S. commanders and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) leaders based in China had differences with those based in India. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was hampered in its efforts to establish positive contacts with the Thais because of the policies that emanated from British political leaders and the Foreign Ministry.

Owing to the very positive cooperation between the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military (primarily the OSS), and to the fact that the Thai perceived the Americans as the party with the least regional ambitions, the United States had the most success in establishing a presence in Thailand during the war. OSS teams formed and trained Thai guerilla units and, through the Thai, gathered valuable intelligence on Japanese activities in the region. The lack of real U.S. interest during the war, however, resulted in an ironic situation after the war. When the civilian-led government, which was largely responsible for inviting the Americans in, was overthrown by the military, which had cooperated with the Japanese, the postwar United States embraced the military junta due to its strong anti-communist policies. The Thai leadership that provided strong support and basing to the United States during the Vietnam conflict represented this faction of Thai politics, not that of the "Free Thai" who fought side by side with U.S. operatives in World War II.

As previously stated, Reynolds's earlier book, Thailand and Japan's Southern Advance 1940-1945, covered the Thai-Japanese relationship in detail. I assume that is the reason that the Japanese are really in the background in Thailand's Secret War. It is not necessary to have read Reynolds's earlier book to understand his present book (this reviewer has not), but it probably is the only way a reader would obtain a complete picture of Thailand's unique role in the war. It would also help to have a general knowledge of the course of the war in Southeast Asia in order to place events in their proper context.

Thailand's Secret War is well researched: a review of the sources indicates that Reynolds accessed both U.S. and British official sources, many western and Thai secondary sources, and has interviewed an impressive number of American, British and Thai participants. It is also a well-written book. Reynolds did an outstanding job in providing a clear narrative of what could be a very confusing story. In many cases, a western reader of Asian military history can get lost in long place and proper names that all seem to sound the same. This is not the case in Thailand's Secret War. I never had a problem tracking and differentiating between the many personalities and locales. A small criticism is that some locations mentioned in the text are not indicated on the maps provided.

This was a very engaging read. I've already mentioned its value in casting light on previously unheralded parts of World War II. It is also a valuable history to help understand the present state of Thailand and Southeast Asia. Thailand is now under a civil government, but is still a strong partner of the United States. Thailand currently faces many issues, including violence in the heavily Muslim southern provinces, and the rise (or taking the long Asian view, the reappearance) of China as a regional power. Southeast Asia is not a singular entity and Thailand especially is a unique country that has remained independent based on its ability to navigate among the great powers. Thailand's Secret War is an excellent case study of such navigation during World War II. There is no reason to believe that Thailand will not follow a similar course when faced with future challenges.


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## archade (Jul 29, 2008)

Mark Moyar. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxvi + 512 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. ISBN 978-0-521-86911-9.

Reviewed by: John Darrell Sherwood, U.S. Naval Historical Center.


The Pitfalls of Historiography

Triumph Forsaken is a sweeping account of the period of the Vietnam War from 1954 to 1965. Up until 1960, American armed forces in the region were involved mainly in training and high-level planning for the South Vietnamese military. Over time, these advisors began to accompany smaller units in the field and occasionally engage in combat with the enemy. The most famous engagement of the period involving American advisors was the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac, but there were many others. Mark Moyar's book does an excellent job of explaining America's military and diplomatic involvement in the war during this time. The book also provides an excellent overview of the internal politics of the war, both in South and North Vietnam. Triumph Forsaken would stand out as the best overall synthesis of the period if it were not for the other major goal of the book--to take a stand in the academic debates about the war and defend the "revisionist" historiography against its critics.

The literature on the Vietnam War has become far too vast to organize into two opposing categories of historiography, but this is exactly what Moyar attempts to do. His central premise is that most Vietnam scholarship can be defined as either orthodox or revisionist. The majority of academic histories, the author believes, fall into the orthodox mold, which "sees America's involvement in the war as wrongheaded and unjust" (p. xi). Orthodox historians contend that America was wrong to go to war in support of a government that lacked legitimacy with the Vietnamese people. Such efforts, these authors hold, are doomed to fail regardless of the military strategy employed. In contrast, revisionists see "the war as noble but improperly executed" (p. xi). Adherents to this school argue that, with the right strategy, the war could have been won. Revisionists also tend to see the conflict as a war between two sovereign states (North and South Vietnam) rather than as an internal civil war in South Vietnam.

Moyar's first book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (1997), maintained that during the latter years of the war "the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies fought effectively and ethically, and that the South Vietnamese populace generally preferred the South Vietnamese government to the Communists during that period," (p. xiii); but stops short of defending U.S. involvement in the war. Triumph Forsaken goes the full distance. It attempts to defend the U.S. government's efforts in Vietnam, arguing that had it not been for the intervention, American credibility in the region would have declined precipitously and other Asian countries would have succumbed to Communism. In short, Moyar, a professor at the Marine Corps University, believes that the domino theory is valid. "Communism's ultimate failure to knock over dominoes in Asia was not inevitable," he claims, "but was instead the result of obstacles that the United States threw in Communism's path by intervening in Vietnam" (p. xxi).

Moyar's defense of the domino theory rests heavily on his analysis of the concurrent Indonesian situation under President Sukarno. Sukarno, Indonesia's first president was deposed in 1965 by a handful of right-wing generals led by Major General Suharto. New scholarship on the 1965 Indonesian coup suggests that Suharto's success in toppling Sukarno and suppressing Communism in the archipelago was "influenced by the U.S. determination in South Vietnam" (p. 382). Recent interviews with participants in those events indicate that senior Indonesian military leaders "would not have resisted the Communists" had the United States pulled out of Vietnam (p. 382). Had Indonesia fallen, reasons the author, other Southeast Asian dominoes would have toppled in short order.

The primary strength of Triumph Forsaken is the author's command of the sources. He fleshes out a lot of new substance from documents in the National Archives and Presidential libraries, and offers new material from Vietnamese documents translated by Merle Pribbenow, an interpreter who served in Vietnam for five years with the CIA. To give just one example, Moyar's description of the 1965 battle of Dong Xoai is the best account of that intense early battle to date. Similarly, his analysis of the Battle of Ap Bac is superb. Far from being the "epitome of Diem government incompetence," as most journalists of the period portrayed it, Moyar reveals it as an opportunity lost for the Viet Cong (p. 205). The South Vietnamese forces did not "perform well," but "neither did they display ineptitude or cowardice" (p 205). Furthermore, the fact that they ultimately took the objective, killing one hundred of the Viet Cong's best troops in the process, demonstrated that the government still "held the upper hand in the war at the time" (p. 202).

The major shortcoming of the book is the author's insistence on defending the revisionist thesis, point by point, even at the risk of stretching his sources to the limits. In discussing the battle of Dien Bien Phu, for example, he argues that the French were on the verge of crushing the Viet Minh, and that U.S. intervention in the battle might have turned a devastating French defeat into a victory over Communism. Moyar bases this argument heavily on the writings of Bui Tinh, a North Vietnamese defector whose writings tend to be highly politicized. Bui Tin apparently attended a lecture by Vo Nguyen Giap, where the General admitted that Dien Bien Phu was the "last desperate action of the Viet Minh army," and that his troops were in danger of running out of supplies and on the "verge of complete exhaustion" (p. 26). Even if this is true, a forceful American intervention could certainly have convinced China (and possibly the Soviet Union as well) to increase aid to their beleaguered Communist allies, either directly with ground troops or by greater assistance with logistics. In January 1950, Mao Zedong had promised Ho Chi Minh that "whatever China has and Vietnam needs, we will provide" (p. 22). Recognizing the value of Chinese military aid throughout the First Indochinese War, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff told President Eisenhower in 1954 that if he wanted to put an end to the Viet Minh, he would have to destroy China.

Moyar is dismayed that revisionist historians are dismissed by some orthodox scholars as "ideologues" who "uncritically" defend American foreign policy during the period, but he lays himself open to the same criticism by making so many hard-to-defend claims (p. xii). For instance, his contention that President Ngo Dinh Diem was not an "obtuse, tyrannical reactionary," but a "highly effective leader" runs contrary to almost everything ever written about the South Vietnamese president (p. xiv). In America's Longest War (1986), George Herring, one of the most respected historians of the war, portrayed the Roman Catholic Diem as an authoritarian who ignored the needs of his people, ruthlessly suppressed dissent, and stirred a popular Buddhist uprising that ultimately led to his fall. Herring's view of Diem reflects the main currents of academic thought on the man, and is hardly radical.

Moyar, however, seeks to swim upstream and rehabilitate Diem's image. He wants to convince readers that the United States should never have helped depose Diem. "Supporting the coup of November 1963," writes Moyar, "was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War" (p. xvii). Both North Vietnamese and American sources reveal that the war was "proceeding satisfactorily" until the coup (p. xvii). Afterwards, according to Moyar, senior South Vietnamese military officers had to focus more attention on internal power struggles than on the war. As a consequence, military effectiveness declined. In essence, the Diem coup prevented the South Vietnamese military from developing an effective counter-insurgency strategy.

Even if Diem were a skilled government administrator, his government still lacked legitimacy with many sections of the South Vietnamese populace. As Moyar himself admits, security was the most significant function of government for the rural peasant, and the National Liberation Front often did a better job of protecting rural hamlets than the South Vietnamese government. "Peasants who joined the Viet Cong insurgency," writes Moyar, "were attracted primarily by the Viet Cong's leadership capabilities and strength" (p. xiv). The South Vietnamese government under Diem simply could not compete in those two vital areas. As Herring wrote, "Diem's policies toward villages--traditionally the backbone of Vietnamese society--demonstrated a singular lack of concern and near callous irresponsibility."[1]

That Diem was a Roman Catholic in a country where such observants--many of whom were expatriates from North Vietnam--only comprised 10 percent of the population further undermined his effectiveness. Moyar, however, denies that Diem favored Catholics, even though five of eighteen cabinet ministers and twelve out of twenty-six provincial heads were Catholic. Moreover, Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, ran the secret services, commanded the Special Forces, and was arguably the second most powerful figure in government. Madame Nhu (Ngo Dinh Nhu's wife) imposed Catholic values on the populace by convincing Diem to outlaw divorce, dancing, gambling, prostitution, contraception, and adultery. Finally, Diem's other brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, served as archbishop of Hue and exerted tremendous influence over the president and his government. Therefore, to posit that Catholic patronage in government did not exist and that the large number of Catholics in civil service related more to their high education than favoritism verges on the polemical.

One could easily take issue with dozens of other assertions in this book, but in the interests of time and space, I will limit my discussion to one more: Laos. Moyar contends that John F. Kennedy's refusal to send American troops into Laos in the Fall of 1962 was a "disastrous concession to the enemy" that would forever hamper the ability of the South Vietnamese and their American ally to wage war effectively against the Communists (p. xv). While North Vietnam's use of Laos to infiltrate supplies and troops to the south certainly created enormous problems for the United States and South Vietnam, it was not the only infiltration route available to the Communists. Before the United States began assisting with maritime interdiction operations, seaborne infiltration was a viable means of supplying the south. Between February 1962 and February 1965, North Vietnamese vessels delivered 5,000 tons of supplies to the coast of South Vietnam. In 1964, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Cambodian chief of state, made this task significantly easier for the National Liberation Front by allowing North Vietnam to ship supplies to South Vietnam via the port of Sihanoukville in Cambodia. Between October 1966 and July 1969, despite an improved U.S. embargo, these deliveries amounted to over 11,000 tons of arms and ammunition.[2] The Communists, in short, proved flexible in altering supply routes as the tactical situation changed on the battlefield. Therefore, Laos was not the linchpin holding together the Communist military effort in the South. Other avenues for supply existed throughout the conflict.

Triumph Forsaken is volume 1 in what Moyar promises will be a two-volume history of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. As its voluminous footnotes reveal, much of the research in this book is first rate. Had the author focused more on writing balanced history and less on defending revisionism, this book could have become the definitive history of the period. A first step for those wishing to justify America's involvement in Vietnam might be to defend the government the United States was backing, but Moyar's strident attempt to rehabilitate Diem is a bridge too far. If he had simply concentrated on more defensible tenets of the revisionist argument, his book might have achieved the sort of recognition garnered by H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (1997), a work some scholars (including Moyar) classify as revisionist, but others view simply as a fresh interpretation of one group of actors in the conflict--the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Moyar, by contrast, paints himself into a corner by defining himself as a staunch revisionist and then setting out to debunk all of the major orthodox claims, starting with the strongest (i.e. the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government). It is far better for an author to avoid the pitfalls of historiography, chart his or her own course, and then let the reviewers argue about where the book lay in the canon of literature on the war.

Notes

[1]. George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 64-65.

[2]. Victor Daniels and Judith C. Erdheim, "Game Warden," January 1976, CRC 284, Center for Naval Analysis, A-2-A-6.


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## archade (Jul 29, 2008)

Andrew Ward. River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. ix + 531 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-641-82923-9.

Reviewed by: Jennifer M. Murray, Department of History, Auburn University.


Military Significance or Postwar Symbolism?

In the aftermath of the Civil War and during the early twentieth century, Americans embraced reconciliation in an effort to reunite a war-torn nation. Eager to forget the harsh realties of the four-year conflict, Northerners and Southerners developed a sanitized interpretation of the events of 1861 to 1865. Union and Confederate veterans from around the nation gathered for reunions and reminiscences, drawing attention to their heroic deeds as soldiers. Consequently, the causes of secession and Civil War were quickly glossed over as men from both sides heralded their gallant efforts. This is not to say that animosity was absent in the post-Civil War society; not every battlefield saw aging veterans shaking hands over a stone wall, nor did the veterans remembered every engagement the same way. Such is the case with the April 12, 1864 "Massacre" of Fort Pillow.

There has been a plethora of works written on nearly every significant Civil War battle, but little scholarly attention has been devoted to the events at Fort Pillow. Andrew Ward's River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War fills this gap in the scholarship. Several significant works exist on the battle's key commanding figure, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, including John Allan Wyeth's That Devil Forrest: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1959) and William F. Currotto's Wizard of the Saddle (1996), yet few historians have examined the battle in its own right. Ward's analysis, therefore, is an excellent addition to the historiography.

Ward's narrative starts with a basic premise: Northerners, Southerners, blacks, and whites do not agree on what occurred at the fort. He suggests that the lack of consensus on the events that transpired stemmed from a desire to define the battle either as a "massacre" or as a hard-fought battle that resulted in a Confederate victory. Accordingly, this either/or dichotomy does not provide a complete or factual understanding of the events. Ward concedes that he initially balked at defining the events at Fort Pillow as a "massacre"; however, his overall tone and conclusion of the work suggests just that--Fort Pillow was a massacre.

River Run Red examines Fort Pillow not only within the context of the Civil War, but also within the larger context of antebellum society. For example, the narrative begins with an examination of society in Tennessee, including the state's initial reluctance to secede from the Union. In addition, Ward provides a comprehensive background of Nathan Bedford Forrest, highlighting Forrest's frontier upbringing, his volatile childhood, and his slave-trading endeavors. Ward explains Forrest's well-known temper as an inevitable consequence of "having to navigate as a free white in a slave society" and his willingness to "protect his own place in society by keeping slaves in theirs" (p. 24).

The heart of Ward's work is devoted to a traditional narration of the battle. Fort Pillow, named after General Gideon Pillow, was built by Confederate engineers in the early stages of the war. In the spring of 1863 Confederates abandoned the fort after a prolonged gunboat siege. The Union army, particularly General William T. Sherman, deemed the fort to be of little strategic value and subsequently ordered the fort to be abandoned. General Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, commanding Union forces in Memphis, ignored General Sherman's order to abandon the fort. Consequently, on February 8, 1864 Union forces of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, commanded by William Bradford, "a marginal amateur" warrior, occupied the fort for use as a garrison and recruiting post (p. 74). By the spring of 1864, Bradford's command included approximately 200 cavalrymen and about 300 black artillerists.

At dawn on the morning of April 12, 1864, Forrest and his men attacked the fort and demanded its surrender. Through a series of misunderstandings, Forrest believed that Bradford would not surrender. Flags of truce were then withdrawn and Forrest's men attacked the fort with a fury. The fighting against the black troops was particularly murderous and, according to Ward, continued after Forrest's cavalrymen spared the white soldiers. On the dispute over whether the fighting at Fort Pillow constituted a massacre, Ward concludes that based on the disproportionate number of Union and Confederate casualties, a massacre "certainly did" occur (p. 227). Ward, however, falls short of directly blaming Forrest for any premeditated slaughter. Ward concludes, "despite Northern accusations to the contrary, Forrest may have been more inclined to save blacks than whites" (p. 235). Furthermore, Forrest's background as a slave trader taught him to "value black captives," and he would have regarded the slaughter of the black troops as a "terrible waste of manpower" (p. 235).

The most interesting section of Ward's analysis is an examination of the competing memories of the massacre. For example, the author explains how Fort Pillow became a "special object of Dixie revisionism," because the massacre tarnished Southern efforts to romanticize their war effort and their soldiers (p. 370). In the aftermath of the Civil War, many Southerners claimed that if a massacre occurred, the fault lay not with Forrest, but with Bradford for refusing to surrender when given the opportunity.

River Run Red offers a fresh look at a controversial event; however, Ward's analysis has several weaknesses. For example, he attempts to balance a thematic approach with a traditional chronological framework, which results in a choppy, disconnected narrative that often leads to confusion. Moreover, Ward's incessant reference to Forrest as the "Wizard" is not only anachronistic, but also appears condescending. Contextually, Ward fails to make a convincing case for the overall importance of the tragic events at Fort Pillow. It appears as though the engagement had little significance to either army's military strategies and was more important symbolically, a point that Ward could have further reinforced. Nonetheless, Andrew Ward offers a comprehensive account of the massacre at Fort Pillow, and is an important contribution to the Civil War historiography.


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## archade (Jul 29, 2008)

Robert J. Schneller Jr. Cushing: Civil War SEAL. Brassey's Military Profiles Series. Series Editor Dennis E. Showalter. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2004. 119 pp. Index. , ISBN 978-1-57488-506-4.

Reviewed by: Douglas W. Cupples, Department of History, The University of Memphis.



Robert J. Schneller Jr., a historian at the U.S. Naval Historical Center, offers a well-written and concise military biography of one of the most important naval figures as well as one of the Civil War's most intriguing and charismatic leaders, William Baker Cushing (1842-74). Part of Brassey's Military Profiles series, this biography is a superb short book in a valuable series that does not attempt to accomplish too much. Schneller has written several other books on the United States Navy, including A Quest for Glory: A Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren (1996), for which he received the 1996 John Lyman Book Award in Biography from the North American Society for Oceanic History; and Farragut: America's First Admiral (2002), also part of Brassey's Military Profiles series.

Despite the important role played by both Confederate and Union navies, the navies are too often eclipsed by the Homeric scale of the land war. In fact, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894-1922) is less than one-fourth the size of the comparable The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880-1901) and less than one-half the size of the recently published supplement to the latter (Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies [1994]). None of the Civil War's naval engagements, for example, has garnered the attention of Gettysburg, and even the revolutionary clash between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia usually focuses on the transition from wood and sail to iron and steel rather than its effects on the overall campaigns. Yet, as Schneller indicates, Cushing, along with David Glasgow Farragut and David Dixon Porter, contributed as much to the final Union victory as did any other military figure.

Cushing did not have a seafaring background. Appointed to the United States Naval Academy from Wisconsin, he was the brother of Alonzo Cushing, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, who died a hero's death at the Battle of Gettysburg. Although the brothers shared many of the same qualities desired in a military leader, William was prone to an impetuosity that, at times, bordered on insubordination. He had a tendency to bully those with whom he disagreed, and he manifested a racist attitude toward blacks, which seemed extreme even for that era. He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy in 1857 but was forced to resign before graduating. With the outbreak of the war in April 1861, however, the navy's need for officers resulted in his appointment as acting master's mate on the USS Minnesota. Cushing found that life on a large ship of the line was too constraining as his overbearing personality often caused problems with his superiors. Nonetheless, his abilities had not gone without notice; he was promoted to lieutenant in July 1862. For the next two years, Cushing's flair for special operations was developed and honed to a fine perfection culminating with the destruction of the Albemarle and the elevation of his status as a legitimate U.S. naval hero. After getting past the chivalric duel between the CSS Alabama and the USS Kearsarge, perhaps the best-known naval event is the bold attack and sinking of the Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle by a small party of sailors led by Lieutenant Cushing on October 27, 1864. Cushing continued to serve with distinction for the remainder of the war and even led a ground assault of sailors and marines against Fort Fisher in 1865. After the war, he commanded the USS Wyoming to prevent Spanish authorities in Cuba from killing American sailors. In 1874, his health declined and he suffered a mental collapse, which soon was followed by his death in December of the same year.

Unfortunately, the subtitle of this biographical sketch is misleading. I would correct the tendency to conflate nineteenth-century terminology with that of the present day. Such terms as "Seal" "Green Beret," etc., are best reserved for the historical contexts in which they were developed and used. Although the intention is generally understood, the term is a contemporary one that denotes a specific branch of Navy Special Operations in the current service. This service division did not exist during the Civil War, and it is best to use terms that are historically accurate.

This minor issue of terminology should not detract from the value of this well-written and informative book. These types of biographical studies are useful contributions to the volume of works available to Civil War readers, whether amateur or professional historians. Adding greater depth than dictionary or encyclopedic entries, they provide insight and character development. Schneller has offered a concise and cogent biography of one of the war's most interesting warriors.


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## archade (Aug 4, 2008)

The Cost of Counterterrorism
Power, Politics, and Liberty
Laura K. Donohue
Stanford University, California


 (ISBN-13: 9780521844444)



In the aftermath of a terrorist attack political stakes are high: legislators fear being seen as lenient or indifferent and often grant the executive broader authorities without thorough debate. The judiciary's role, too, is restricted: constitutional structure and cultural norms narrow the courts' ability to check the executive at all but the margins. The dominant 'Security or Freedom' framework for evaluating counterterrorist law thus fails to capture an important characteristic: increased executive power that shifts the balance between branches of government. This book re-calculates the cost of counterterrorist law to the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that the damage caused is significantly greater than first appears. Donohue warns that the proliferation of biological and nuclear materials, together with willingness on the part of extremists to sacrifice themselves, may drive each country to take increasingly drastic measures with a resultant shift in the basic structure of both states.

• Topical: an ambitious argument against the ‘Security or Freedom’ framework, which is the dominant paradigm for thinking about counterterrorist law • The first book to compare the history of both British and American counterterrorist law • Argues that counterterrorist law is a danger to the rights central to liberal democracy: life, liberty, property, privacy and free speech


Contents

1. The perilous dichotomy; 2. Indefinite detention and coercive interrogation; 3. Financial counterterrorism; 4. Privacy and surveillance; 5. Terrorist speech and free expression; 6. Auxiliary precautions.
Reviews

‘Laura Donohue’s sophisticated and complex analysis of counterterrorism law in the United Kingdom and United States warns of the risks to fundamental individual rights when democracies establish counterterrorist regimes. Although governments frame their initiatives in terms of a choice between security and freedom, Donohue challenges this logic. Loss of liberty is not necessarily balanced by gain in safety. Compromises intended to be temporary turn out to be permanent. Leaders and citizens of democracies would be well advised to heed this pointed and timely warning.’ Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University

'Laura Donohue's is a distinctive and authoritative voice in the field of counterterrorism law. Her account of the impact of such laws on civil liberties in Britain and the US is comprehensive and compelling, but it is also very disturbing to those who care about freedom.' Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights Law, London School of Economics

‘This masterly analysis of recent counter-terrorist legislation in the UK and USA should be required reading for governments and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic. It should also be read by all those who care about the price of security in terms of personal freedom and human rights.’ Rt Hon Lord Lloyd of Berwick

‘Within the context of the allied jurisdictions of the United Kingdom and the United States, this book offers a uniquely detailed thematic audit of the drastic reshaping of the law for the sake of security against terrorism. It is indisputably the finest comparative exposition and analysis of the primary laws against terrorism yet produced in either jurisdiction.’ Clive Walker, Professor of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds

‘A dazzlingly, comprehensive and penetrating diagnosis of how Western governments too often react to terrorism by promoting executive power in reckless disregard of the fundamental principles of liberty on which their legitimacy rests. Many authors decry this phenomenon, but this book is unique in its parallel treatment of the United States and British developments, its especially clear treatment of the daunting subject of ‘financial counterterrorism’, and in its deployment of both the grand narrative skill of a historian and the unyielding analytic rigor of a lawyer. In its elegant synthesis of materials ranging from treaties to judicial decisions to legislation to administrative protocols, this book is at once an impressive intellectual achievement and an alarming admonition.’ Robert Weisberg, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law and Director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Stanford University


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## archade (Aug 8, 2008)

Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. vii + 280 pp. Notes, index. , ISBN 0870710478.

Reviewed for H-War by Eric Swedin, Department of Information Systems and Technologies, Weber State University



Combining Environmental History and Military History

Many of us remember the environmental catastrophes of the Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi deliberately spilled oil into the Persian Gulf and then deliberately set Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, turning the sky dark with smoke. It is an obvious statement that war affects the environment and that the environment affects wars. Very few books have been written on this subject and this collection of essays is the first volume of its kind. The editors admit that it was hard to find enough essays for the book because this new multidisciplinary approach, crossing military history with environmental history, is not attracting enough attention. The essays range across the globe and time, from India and South Africa in colonial times to America during the Civil War. Four of the ten essays cover aspects of World War II, perhaps because of plentiful source material. Considering how hard it was to find material, it is surprising that none of the essays are weak, and that the wide range of topics and approaches lend strength to the work.

Warfare has always exploited the environment. One of the essays describes the massive Mughal imperial army in India moving across the landscape like a lawnmower, stripping the countryside of fodder and food, leaving behind waste. Armies laying siege to ancient and medieval cities recognized that the siege was a race between the time the stored supplies in the cities would last and how long the besieging armies could live off the countryside while remaining tied to the siege. Armies throughout history have often had their strategy driven by the need to find fresh areas to forage.

During the American Civil War, the Confederate forces had to forage and scavenge off the land and relied on the local ecology to survive, while the Union forces relied on their entire nation, using the extensive rail network and industrial base to live off of preserved meat, hardtack, and other supplies made in factories. The Confederates were still confined to an older military ecology, with all the limitations of logistics that implied; the Union forces were a modern army, relying on industrial supply networks and not beholden to the local ecology.

At times, generals have recognized that destroying the local environment is a useful way to bring the enemy to heel, with examples found in British tactics during the Boer War, the American decimation of the bison on the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, and the American use of herbicides during the Vietnam War. Sometimes environmental damage is inadvertent, such as when whales are mistaken for submarines by ships dropping depth charges.

We often think of war as only destroying the environment. For instance, during World War II when Japan was cut off from normal supplies of raw materials, they cut down their forests for fuel, logging 15 percent of their forests in just four years. They even stripped the leaves and undergrowth from the forests in order to make compost for their fields because the raw materials formerly used to make chemical fertilizers were now needed to make munitions. Japanese scientists tried to develop new alternative fuels from pine-root oil and other organic products, most of which failed. Edible refined soybean oil, however, fueled the battleship Yamato on its famous final voyage in April 1945. The Japanese people used mist-netting and bird-liming to catch so many migratory songbirds for food that postwar American occupation troops noticed the lack of singing birds. But the war was not completely an environmental catastrophe; fishing stocks rebounded from over fishing because Japanese trawlers and factory ships were unable to conduct their business during the war. Fishing stocks rebounded similarly in the North Atlantic. Water pollution was reduced in Finland during the war because pulp mills and other logging operations were interrupted.

World War I and World War II both required advances in insecticides, and the terminology of war was applied to the war against insects. In order to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, American forces successfully fought malaria with medicine and insecticides at the same time, a struggle where eight soldiers caught the disease for every one who fell before the human enemy. Americans also brought pests and diseases with them, such as ticks and cattle diseases, which are still there. Another long-term consequence of World War II was that before the war Japan supplied dried chrysanthemum blossoms to the United States for processing into insecticide. During the war, the Americans adopted dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) as an insecticide, and after the war the Japanese pyrethrum industry was unable to rebound, so DDT use continued. Military necessity has also created environmental havens. Demilitarized zones, such as that which divides North and South Korea, are places where animals and birds often thrive. Military bases around the world, while often sources of environmental problems because of toxic chemical dumps and other types of pollution, are also often refuges for endangered wildlife and provide room for ecological diversity to thrive.

Interdisciplinary research is how we build grander, more complete historical narratives, which should be the goal of all historians. I hope this book will spark similar research, because the fields of military history and environmental history need more articles like these. As one of the editors writes in his essay, “humans’ collective violence toward each other has had a profound parallel with humans’ violent disruptions of the natural world. Neither can be fully comprehended without the other” (p. 37).


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## archade (Aug 12, 2008)

Tony Shaw. Hollywood’s Cold War. Culture, Politics, and the Cold War Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 342 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index., ISBN 1-55849-611-4; , ISBN 1-55849-612-2.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Giles Scott-Smith, Roosevelt Study Center, Netherlands



The Mighty Projector?

Of all U.S. cultural products in the twentieth century, surely movies were the most exemplary (with the possible exception of food). They were also the most adept medium for propaganda purposes. Tony Shaw’s comprehensive survey of Hollywood’s role in the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1920s onward leaves few archives untouched and few movies unseen. Shaw chronicles how movies were central to the total conflict that was the Cold War and perfect for reifying a U.S. democratic identity while simultaneously undermining, ridiculing, or exposing the truth-claims of communism and its Soviet adherents. All forces in society needed to be mobilized for the cause, and the “state-film network,” from government officials and studio bosses down to production staff and the cast, were in their own particular ways part of this escapade.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of Hollywood’s commitment to the Cold War, Shaw presents a series of case studies from the 1930s to the 1980s through which he unpacks the many layers involved in cultural production and reception. He begins his deconstruction of the movie industry’s reactionary politics soon after 1917. Prior to the Russian Revolution, filmmakers did not shirk from dealing with social strife, however much the films generally still ended in capitalist bliss. But the Red Scare, combined with the solidification of the studio system and dominance by the big eight (MGM, Paramount, Warner, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) turned Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s into a fantasy factory determined to woo its mass audiences with the emotions of romance and the products of success. Big business (and its financiers on Wall Street) saw in movies the perfect vehicle (or opium) for distracting the public away from questioning the realities of quotidian inequalities. However, by analyzing Great Garbo’s movie Ninotchka, Shaw highlights well the change in mood and environment before and after World War II. Originally released by MGM in 1939, the movie lampooned rather than lambasted the Soviet experiment, while its re-release in 1947, deliberately timed to profit from the growing concerns over the Soviet threat, turned it into a more obvious political document, not least in Western Europe. By 1957, it had been remade into Silk Stockings, a musical that went several steps further than the original in emphasizing the exuberant vitality of the West and the accessibility of its uninhibited consumerism.

Hollywood may have produced some remarkable pro-Soviet movies during the mid-1940s to sell Moscow’s war effort to the American public, but it was also during that period that right-wing pressure groups began to gain influence, such as the Catholic National League of Decency and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. By the 1950s, the portrayal of Communists and communism was far more black-and-white than before the war, in line with Washington’s demonization of the main U.S. adversary. But Shaw, as in every dimension of this book, is judiciously careful not to draw any simplistic conclusions. His list of reasons for 1950s conservatism ranges from the financially opportunistic to the wish to protect studio reputations, but it is the need to avoid further mauling at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that strikes the sharpest cord. HUAC trailed its way through tinsel town in 1947, 1951-2, 1953, and 1955-8 as part of its consistent campaign to ensure an unswerving anticommunist line from the U.S. media and entertainment industry. No direct evidence of communist subversion was ever found, but HUAC demanded retribution anyway, and the studios complied with a blacklist of around two thousand people who were ejected from the Hollywood payroll and not readmitted before the 1960s. An aspect of this story that Shaw does not address is how far the accusation of communism was used as a weapon against those who were suspect because they were recent immigrants. If Hollywood needed to be all-American in outlook, were foreigners more likely to be tainted with subversive tendencies as a result?

Shaw explores the intricacies of Cold War film politics further through a series of studies on George Orwell, science fiction, race, John Wayne, the CIA, and, unexpectedly, Alex Cox, who represented a remarkable collision between freewheeling British indie filmmaking and the limitations of U.S. corporate conservatism in the 1980s. The details of the Pentagon’s involvement with Hollywood, which Shaw dismantles via The Green Berets (1968), are revealing enough. But the investigation of the film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm  (1954) and 1984 (1956) takes the analysis to a new level. Orwell, of course, is regarded as an icon of independent left thinking, although this reputation did take a hit with revelations of his list of undesirable leftists provided for the British government’s Information Research Department. [2] The intricate story of how these two novels were brought to the screen, by whom, and for what specific reasons, is a gem of a chapter. Were they successful in conveying the essential evils of totalitarianism to receptive audiences? They possibly were. Do these examples give us an insight into the ideological thinking of those involved, and the kind of conflict that they understood the Cold War to be? Yes, they absolutely do.

Two comments can be made on Shaw’s approach. Firstly, while he refers to the impact of major changes in the economics of film production, it is presented as no more than one influence among many on the line that movies took instead of being a decisive influence. Nevertheless, there is a sequence of events sketched through the book that clearly had a major influence: the rise of the studio system and the big eight in the 1920s, the decline of the studio system in the 1950s due partly to the rise of television, the need for renewal that brought a younger creative generation to the fore in the early 1970s, and the power of “big capital” in the 1980s. It would have been straightforward to have explained the developing outlook of Hollywood solely on these structural shifts. To Shaw’s credit, he avoids this line, instead appreciating at every opportunity the many layers involved when interpreting the production and reception of a movie. Secondly, Shaw neglects cinematic satire, and therefore does not examine the critical side of Hollywood. The early 1960s shrugged off the paranoia of the previous decade (only to encounter new ones, of course, but that is another story), allowing space for several movies that sought to undermine the standard interpretation of the East-West confrontation. They did this by turning it into an opportunity for sociopolitical comedy, either of the light (One, Two, Three [1961]) or dark variety (Dr. Strangelove [1964]), or as a means to highlight how both sides were equally corrupted (The Manchurian Candidate [1962]). Shaw mentions all three movies in the book, but only in passing, and he mentions satire only briefly in relation to the spate of swinging spy movies in the late sixties. More could perhaps have been made of these and other examples of how Hollywood sought to deflect the strictures of Cold War politics not by head-on criticism but by pastiche, ridicule, and unbounded eccentricity. Billy Wilder, in this respect, could have featured more here, having been on the production team of Ninotchka; refusing to testify to HUAC; suspected by the CIA’s man at Paramount, Luigi Luraschi, of being too pro-Soviet; and making a string of second-to-none movies (Sunset Boulevard [1950], Some Like It Hot [1959], The Apartment [1960]) before spoofing the superpower system in One, Two, Three. But Wilder was driven by the art of moviemaking, not by Cold War concerns, and he, therefore, does not fit so easily in this narrative.

Throughout the book, Shaw points out the workings of propaganda and lessons to be drawn from its application. The best propaganda, as one astute critic noted in 1955, is indirect, coming in under an audience’s radar. The Psychological Strategy Board’s approach in the same decade was that to be good propaganda, art itself had to be of a sufficient quality. And above all, propaganda works best by reinforcing existing beliefs and sentiments instead of trying to convert. So where does the book leave us in terms of understanding Hollywood’s Cold War? Overall, one has the strong impression that it was big business using the conflict to make money as much as government using big business to wage the conflict. But that is precisely the point. The Cold War’s agendas, caricatures, and lines of demarcation did seep into every aspect of social life, and it would be strange if the movies did not reflect this. Both government and business were in a “harmonious relationship” based “at root on the need to protect capitalism” (p. 304). The problem for historical analysis such as this, of course, is that everything can easily slip into one-dimensionality—if the Cold War was everywhere, it was, in the end, nowhere. On the whole, Shaw avoids this trap; the quality of his research confirms that Hollywood did not simply project a state-scripted ideology but displayed “a range of different ideologies,” generally interlocking, sometimes merging, and occasionally clashing (p. 303). For this reason, the “state-film network” to which he refers is after all best illustrated through the case studies he provides, it being an uneven and constantly shifting marriage of convenience (or conviction, depending on who was involved). Hollywood was no more an agenda-setter than it was a gatekeeper for a Cold War consensus based on U.S. leadership, the vitality of free society, and the fear of failure.

In short, this is a complex and rewarding book, held together with a coherent argument but not afraid to admit the many-sided possibilities when interpreting cultural products. Occasionally, Shaw does overstep the line, such that the infamous The Blob from 1958 becomes “an objective correlative for the right-wing fear of ‘creeping communism’” (p. 138). But we can forgive him this, not only because this is a fine, well-researched work, but mainly because in dealing with Hollywood, of all subjects, one should be allowed the occasional lapse into excess.



Note

[1]. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1992), 483-484; Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 468; and Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London: Penguin, 2004), 111-121.


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## archade (Aug 12, 2008)

Tony Shaw. Hollywood’s Cold War. Culture, Politics, and the Cold War Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 342 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index., ISBN 1-55849-611-4; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 1-55849-612-2.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Giles Scott-Smith, Roosevelt Study Center, Netherlands



The Mighty Projector?

Of all U.S. cultural products in the twentieth century, surely movies were the most exemplary (with the possible exception of food). They were also the most adept medium for propaganda purposes. Tony Shaw’s comprehensive survey of Hollywood’s role in the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1920s onward leaves few archives untouched and few movies unseen. Shaw chronicles how movies were central to the total conflict that was the Cold War and perfect for reifying a U.S. democratic identity while simultaneously undermining, ridiculing, or exposing the truth-claims of communism and its Soviet adherents. All forces in society needed to be mobilized for the cause, and the “state-film network,” from government officials and studio bosses down to production staff and the cast, were in their own particular ways part of this escapade.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of Hollywood’s commitment to the Cold War, Shaw presents a series of case studies from the 1930s to the 1980s through which he unpacks the many layers involved in cultural production and reception. He begins his deconstruction of the movie industry’s reactionary politics soon after 1917. Prior to the Russian Revolution, filmmakers did not shirk from dealing with social strife, however much the films generally still ended in capitalist bliss. But the Red Scare, combined with the solidification of the studio system and dominance by the big eight (MGM, Paramount, Warner, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) turned Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s into a fantasy factory determined to woo its mass audiences with the emotions of romance and the products of success. Big business (and its financiers on Wall Street) saw in movies the perfect vehicle (or opium) for distracting the public away from questioning the realities of quotidian inequalities. However, by analyzing Great Garbo’s movie Ninotchka, Shaw highlights well the change in mood and environment before and after World War II. Originally released by MGM in 1939, the movie lampooned rather than lambasted the Soviet experiment, while its re-release in 1947, deliberately timed to profit from the growing concerns over the Soviet threat, turned it into a more obvious political document, not least in Western Europe. By 1957, it had been remade into Silk Stockings, a musical that went several steps further than the original in emphasizing the exuberant vitality of the West and the accessibility of its uninhibited consumerism.

Hollywood may have produced some remarkable pro-Soviet movies during the mid-1940s to sell Moscow’s war effort to the American public, but it was also during that period that right-wing pressure groups began to gain influence, such as the Catholic National League of Decency and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. By the 1950s, the portrayal of Communists and communism was far more black-and-white than before the war, in line with Washington’s demonization of the main U.S. adversary. But Shaw, as in every dimension of this book, is judiciously careful not to draw any simplistic conclusions. His list of reasons for 1950s conservatism ranges from the financially opportunistic to the wish to protect studio reputations, but it is the need to avoid further mauling at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that strikes the sharpest cord. HUAC trailed its way through tinsel town in 1947, 1951-2, 1953, and 1955-8 as part of its consistent campaign to ensure an unswerving anticommunist line from the U.S. media and entertainment industry. No direct evidence of communist subversion was ever found, but HUAC demanded retribution anyway, and the studios complied with a blacklist of around two thousand people who were ejected from the Hollywood payroll and not readmitted before the 1960s. An aspect of this story that Shaw does not address is how far the accusation of communism was used as a weapon against those who were suspect because they were recent immigrants. If Hollywood needed to be all-American in outlook, were foreigners more likely to be tainted with subversive tendencies as a result?

Shaw explores the intricacies of Cold War film politics further through a series of studies on George Orwell, science fiction, race, John Wayne, the CIA, and, unexpectedly, Alex Cox, who represented a remarkable collision between freewheeling British indie filmmaking and the limitations of U.S. corporate conservatism in the 1980s. The details of the Pentagon’s involvement with Hollywood, which Shaw dismantles via The Green Berets (1968), are revealing enough. But the investigation of the film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm  (1954) and 1984 (1956) takes the analysis to a new level. Orwell, of course, is regarded as an icon of independent left thinking, although this reputation did take a hit with revelations of his list of undesirable leftists provided for the British government’s Information Research Department. [2] The intricate story of how these two novels were brought to the screen, by whom, and for what specific reasons, is a gem of a chapter. Were they successful in conveying the essential evils of totalitarianism to receptive audiences? They possibly were. Do these examples give us an insight into the ideological thinking of those involved, and the kind of conflict that they understood the Cold War to be? Yes, they absolutely do.

Two comments can be made on Shaw’s approach. Firstly, while he refers to the impact of major changes in the economics of film production, it is presented as no more than one influence among many on the line that movies took instead of being a decisive influence. Nevertheless, there is a sequence of events sketched through the book that clearly had a major influence: the rise of the studio system and the big eight in the 1920s, the decline of the studio system in the 1950s due partly to the rise of television, the need for renewal that brought a younger creative generation to the fore in the early 1970s, and the power of “big capital” in the 1980s. It would have been straightforward to have explained the developing outlook of Hollywood solely on these structural shifts. To Shaw’s credit, he avoids this line, instead appreciating at every opportunity the many layers involved when interpreting the production and reception of a movie. Secondly, Shaw neglects cinematic satire, and therefore does not examine the critical side of Hollywood. The early 1960s shrugged off the paranoia of the previous decade (only to encounter new ones, of course, but that is another story), allowing space for several movies that sought to undermine the standard interpretation of the East-West confrontation. They did this by turning it into an opportunity for sociopolitical comedy, either of the light (One, Two, Three [1961]) or dark variety (Dr. Strangelove [1964]), or as a means to highlight how both sides were equally corrupted (The Manchurian Candidate [1962]). Shaw mentions all three movies in the book, but only in passing, and he mentions satire only briefly in relation to the spate of swinging spy movies in the late sixties. More could perhaps have been made of these and other examples of how Hollywood sought to deflect the strictures of Cold War politics not by head-on criticism but by pastiche, ridicule, and unbounded eccentricity. Billy Wilder, in this respect, could have featured more here, having been on the production team of Ninotchka; refusing to testify to HUAC; suspected by the CIA’s man at Paramount, Luigi Luraschi, of being too pro-Soviet; and making a string of second-to-none movies (Sunset Boulevard [1950], Some Like It Hot [1959], The Apartment [1960]) before spoofing the superpower system in One, Two, Three. But Wilder was driven by the art of moviemaking, not by Cold War concerns, and he, therefore, does not fit so easily in this narrative.

Throughout the book, Shaw points out the workings of propaganda and lessons to be drawn from its application. The best propaganda, as one astute critic noted in 1955, is indirect, coming in under an audience’s radar. The Psychological Strategy Board’s approach in the same decade was that to be good propaganda, art itself had to be of a sufficient quality. And above all, propaganda works best by reinforcing existing beliefs and sentiments instead of trying to convert. So where does the book leave us in terms of understanding Hollywood’s Cold War? Overall, one has the strong impression that it was big business using the conflict to make money as much as government using big business to wage the conflict. But that is precisely the point. The Cold War’s agendas, caricatures, and lines of demarcation did seep into every aspect of social life, and it would be strange if the movies did not reflect this. Both government and business were in a “harmonious relationship” based “at root on the need to protect capitalism” (p. 304). The problem for historical analysis such as this, of course, is that everything can easily slip into one-dimensionality—if the Cold War was everywhere, it was, in the end, nowhere. On the whole, Shaw avoids this trap; the quality of his research confirms that Hollywood did not simply project a state-scripted ideology but displayed “a range of different ideologies,” generally interlocking, sometimes merging, and occasionally clashing (p. 303). For this reason, the “state-film network” to which he refers is after all best illustrated through the case studies he provides, it being an uneven and constantly shifting marriage of convenience (or conviction, depending on who was involved). Hollywood was no more an agenda-setter than it was a gatekeeper for a Cold War consensus based on U.S. leadership, the vitality of free society, and the fear of failure.

In short, this is a complex and rewarding book, held together with a coherent argument but not afraid to admit the many-sided possibilities when interpreting cultural products. Occasionally, Shaw does overstep the line, such that the infamous The Blob from 1958 becomes “an objective correlative for the right-wing fear of ‘creeping communism’” (p. 138). But we can forgive him this, not only because this is a fine, well-researched work, but mainly because in dealing with Hollywood, of all subjects, one should be allowed the occasional lapse into excess.



Note

[1]. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1992), 483-484; Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 468; and Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London: Penguin, 2004), 111-121.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

nthony Clayton. The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. xiv + 335 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index., ISBN 978-1-4058-5901-1.

Reviewed by: Keith Surridge, Independent Scholar.


The British Army is now constantly in the news owing to its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has generated much interest in the troops themselves and recently the army has been the subject of several television documentaries. One that will air soon features a former soap opera actor embedded with a particular unit. The involvement of Princes William and Harry in the army, both of whom have successfully trained as junior officers, keeps its media profile high. Moreover, retired senior officers have been publishing their memoirs; the most recent, and perhaps outspoken, is that by General Sir Mike Jackson, Soldier: the Autobiography (2007). His trenchant views on operations in Kosovo, and especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, caused much comment in the press. Thus, a book that seeks to explore the British army officer from earliest times to the modern era is timely.

With recent events in mind, Anthony Clayton, a former lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in line with a lot of press opinion, points out that most politicians have no experience of army life. And, consequently, they have no understanding of the stresses and strains placed upon officers who have to meld individuals into fighting units and command them in combat situations. His book, therefore, seeks to give some idea of how officers have coped over the centuries with leading men in peace and war. Examining the role of the officer from the modern army's foundation in 1660 to the twenty-first century, Clayton discusses the social background of officers; their training and motivation; and how they have interacted with their men. Influencing all these is the peculiar nature of the British regiment, a "mutual obligation society" (p. 7), with its ancient traditions, that has no counterpart elsewhere.

Clayton explains that for much of the period, the army officer was recruited from the aristocracy and gentry. They were politically reliable, not very well-educated, and not interested much in their profession. War, like politics, was a vocation: officers were expected to sacrifice their wealth in a form of "noblesse oblige." Although many considered it their duty and privilege to lead, commanding regiments was an expensive business. The most expensive outlay for an officer was his commission, his appointment by the crown to a particular rank. For those with money promotion could be easily purchased; for those without ready cash, the officer could expect to sell his commission for a substantial profit at the end of his career. In effect, this was a sanctioned form of pension provision. Officers treated their commissions as property, which fitted neatly into the ethos that society should be based on property and property-holders should govern the country. However, with senior officers also responsible for feeding and clothing their men, corruption abounded. The state provided few financial incentives, so officers often turned to crime to earn their perquisites. In peacetime, many officers were simply crooks and took little interest in their men or their profession. Yet, in times of war, they led their men from the front, and led by example. This indeed was the paradox of the army officer: often a crooked nincompoop in peace, but a fire-breathing warrior in war.

During the nineteenth century, the army officer became more professional and various abuses were removed. Officer-cadet training was implemented with the foundation of what later became known as the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The purchase of commissions for children was outlawed, and later, in 1871, the buying of commissions was abolished altogether. Thereafter, promotion was by seniority tempered with merit, although the large number of imperial conflicts ensured that opportunities for advancement were readily available. Moreover, the officer was expected to take better care of his men, while still exercising an effortless sense of social superiority. This change in attitude took a while to catch on, but by the end of the century some officers were promoting temperance, moral reformation, and the provision of libraries. Clayton argues that these efforts helped to improve the public perception of the army, which is true enough. But I would suggest that this only went so far: Rudyard Kipling, for example, still needed to write his poem Tommy (1890) to show that the public continued to hold negative views of the troops.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, the officer corps expanded and many men came from social backgrounds hitherto considered unsuitable. Nevertheless, officers were still expected to lead by example and consequently suffered the highest proportion of casualties within the army. The dangers of front-line duty were so bad that the life expectancy of a newly arrived junior officer was one month.

Afterwards, the army reverted to its traditional role of imperial policeman, which provided excellent training for officers. Indeed, standards were very high, even though the officer reverted to type in that he was recruited from the usual classes, and remained "cheerful, carefree and inclined to arrogance" (p. 195). Such attitudes, however, were found wanting following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The disastrous campaign in France in 1940 revealed that officers were unprepared for a modern, European conflict. The whole recruiting system was shaken up and by the end of the war the selection of officers had improved immensely, although there were acute shortages.

Being well-educated had never been a priority in the recruitment of officers, and, surprisingly perhaps, this view continued after 1945. Up to the 1960s, the main criterion was the ability to "fit in," and so social class retained its importance in selection procedures. This all began to change once it became easier for young people to go to university during the 1960s. Many officers now have university degrees and the army has adjusted more to the vagaries of modern society, perhaps better than at any other time. There are now women officers, divorced officers are tolerated, and same-sex relationships are accepted. Many officers no longer come from the traditional classes, although there is still a shortage of officers from non-white backgrounds. It would have been good, however, if we could have been told the percentage of officers from the public schools. My suspicion is that they are still overrepresented. It seems that in a short period of time the army has undergone acute social changes as it reassesses its commitments in the modern world. Because of this, Clayton worries how the army might be perceived by public opinion. At the moment, it would seem his fears are unfounded because the army has rarely been held higher in public esteem. It is perceived as having to clear up the mess left by politicians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clayton has reviewed the life and careers of army officers over the centuries in an accessible manner and will help our understanding of the modern service. His overall view of the relationship between officers and men since 1660 is positive. The behavior of officers was often problematic for the men and the service, but in general they have always managed to maintain the loyalty, and sometimes affection, of the men they have commanded. His conclusion is particularly valuable in summing up the personal and professional considerations of the contemporary officer. However, the scope of the work means, as Clayton explains in the foreword, that it has its limitations. In my view this has meant the book falls somewhere between a social history of the officer corps and a military history. I was disappointed, therefore, not to find a substantial guide to further reading. There is no mention, for example, of important books by Edward Spiers (The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1902 [1992]) or David French (Raising Churchill's Army. The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945 [2000]). This criticism aside, Clayton's book is a useful starting point for any student of the British army and its leaders.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

Jon Lee Anderson. The Fall of Baghdad. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. viii + 375 pp. Maps, index. , ISBN 978-0-14-303585-5.
Reviewed by: Wm. Shane Story, U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Published by: H-War (May, 2006)


An Iraqi Tragedy

Like a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare, Jon Anderson has raced after America's war on terror without catching his prey. Nevertheless, the race has made a good story. A veteran foreign correspondent, Anderson returned to old haunts in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11 to report on the fall of the Taliban. A year later, Anderson published The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan(2002), but the world's attention suddenly shifted to Iraq and Anderson continued the chase. The Fall of Baghdad is Anderson's travelogue of the next twenty-one months, from Saddam's referendum and prisoner amnesty in October 2002 to Ambassador Paul Bremer's self-congratulatory departure from Baghdad in June 2004. Anderson's writing emphasizes details, colors, and the ambience of the places he visits and the facial expressions of the people he meets and cultivates as sources. For background material, Anderson jumbles years and events--1958, 1920, 1979, an assassination, a coup--suggesting hidden meanings in such anachronisms. Anderson sees contradictions everywhere, and he dresses them up as riddles. Offering intrigue at the expense of analysis or answers, Anderson's riddles bear only a patina of wisdom.

Developing portraits of a few Iraqis to give his story depth, Anderson emphasizes the experiences of Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam Hussein's doctor, favorite artist, and confidant. Bashir saw Hussein as a ruthless survivor, and his system of survival depended on tyranny. Tyranny, Bashir thought, was a virtual prerequisite for governing Iraq, so even its mass killings--or killings of the masses were not beyond the pale, because they were necessary to sustain the state. On the other hand, Bashir damned the regime he served for its unmitigated corruption, for "dictatorship, for murder, for torture and bloodshed" (p. 70). The system culminated in Saddam's despotic son Uday, a psychopath, serial rapist, thief, and murderer who transformed tyranny into recreation and "humiliated many Iraqis, many officials" (p. 292). Bashir believed such corruption sealed the regime's fate; someone had to overthrow Saddam.

Bashir admired western democracies and thought that life was worthless in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and communist China, and yet "no place was crueler than Iraq" (p. 71). Although Bashir prospered because Saddam survived, he held America responsible for Iraq's fate. Just as the United States kept Castro in power in Cuba, Bashir thought, the United States kept Saddam in power for its own purposes. Most Iraqis must have shared Bashir's impression of America's virtual omnipotence, because when the Americans came, resistance seemed pointless and the regime collapsed. Bashir claimed vindication; "I was expecting this" (p. 291).

The regime's swift collapse hardly seemed predictable in the midst of the invasion. The bombing campaign, which General Franks had billed as "shock and awe," was impressive in its scale and precision, but it failed to topple the regime. Once American forces reached Baghdad, however, panic set in and civilians fled. When Iraqi soldiers declined to fight, the government fell and disorder spread. Initial encounters between American forces and Iraqis tended toward friendly amusement in an atmosphere of liberation. Disorder grew, however, as looting escalated into mob frenzies. With the situation out of control, American forces began stopping traffic, erecting barriers, implementing curfews and detaining hundreds of suspects. Anderson left Iraq in late April 2003, when the Americans seemed to be re-establishing authority and laying the groundwork for a transitional Iraqi government.

Weeks of instability, however, kept Iraq in the headlines, and Anderson returned to Baghdad in the latter half of June 2003. An American official warned Anderson that Iraq was a mess and very dangerous, especially around the western towns of Ar Ramadi and Al Fallujah. The American enterprise, the official thought, gave every sign of failing. In Baghdad, Anderson found Bashir full of complaints about the Americans. Americans gave the impression of listening and caring about Iraqis' welfare, Bashir said, but they did not deliver on their promises. Moreover, tribal chiefs complained that the Americans dissembled about their intentions and had failed "to put things right"(p. 319). Anderson's visit to an American unit in Fallujah confirmed his worst fears about the American forces' inability to comprehend or deal with Iraqis. The troops were lost, and the chain of command was in denial. An American battalion commander, whom Anderson described as enthusiastic, stated, "Fallujah is a success story" (p. 328). Anderson's tour of Fallujah with an armored patrol indicated otherwise. At one point, Anderson witnessed an unwinnable testosterone-driven clash between a Fallujah shopkeeper and an American soldier, a "psy ops officer, a beefy man in his thirties" (p. 331). The American, who presumably thought his pierced tongue was an expression of stylish independence, found it brought only insults and ridicule from the Iraqis. Fear and respect were long gone, and laughing young Fallujans toyed with the Americans as a prelude to attacking them.

Month by month the situation deteriorated. Iraqis demanded solutions and respect from the Americans, but denounced and assassinated other Iraqis for working with occupiers. American actions seemed clumsy and inept, whether it was cracking down or backing off, all of it culminating in the stillborn Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first pictures of Abu Ghraib torture surfaced, followed by jihadists sawing off Nicholas Berg's head. Finally, Paul Bremer turned sovereignty back over to the Iraqis on June 28, 2004 and returned to Washington, satisfied that he had left Iraq better than he found it.

Anderson's style imposed its own limitations on his work. Long before the invasion, Anderson cultivated relationships with Iraqis approved by the regime--his driver, his "minder" from the Ministry of Information, and ranking regime insiders like Saddam's doctor--to provide personalities and depth for his stories. Anderson tracked these same individuals' lives after Saddam's fall. Anderson's regime-connected contacts accepted Saddam's demise as necessary, but they were stunned to see their own fortunes melt away as well. Theirs is the tragic story that Anderson relates, and not that of the Kurds or Shiites whose torture was Saddam and whose freedom was anything but Saddam.

As Anderson closed his work in 2004, he saw great risks in Iraq, both of a nationwide jihad against the Americans and of an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war. The Fall of Baghdad illuminates some of the prejudices and conflicts that energized the strife. Those insights make Anderson's work a worthwhile read, with the caveat that readers should not expect a developed or documented consideration of the failed defense of Baghdad or any comprehension of American military operations. Since Anderson offers no analysis, the wait continues for a capable study of the American war and the Iraqi crisis.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

The Russian General Staff. The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Translated and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress. Modern War Studies Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xxvi + 364 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, glossary, index., ISBN 978-0-7006-1185-0; , ISBN 978-0-7006-1186-7.

Reviewed by: Jonathan M. House, Department of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

Published by: H-War (March, 2006)

The Bear and the Mujahideen

Since Karl Marx considered history to be a science, the professional soldiers of the Soviet Union always placed a high priority on detailed historical analysis of military operations. Throughout World War II, the Soviets collected, analyzed, and disseminated detailed lessons after each campaign and major battle. Yet, because the Soviet Union saw itself as the champion of wars of national liberation throughout the world, the one type of military operation that few Soviet officers ever contemplated was one in which the Soviet Army would be called upon to suppress a popular insurgency. This ideological blindness goes far to explain not only the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, but also the unusual nature of the official history that the General Staff belatedly published about that conflict.

This Russian General Staff study is available in English thanks to a superb translation and editing effort. Lester Grau, a longtime analyst of the Soviet military, has already produced two seminal studies of the Afghan war in his own right, and Michael Gress is a veteran of the Soviet motorized rifle forces. Both historians and soldiers owe these men a considerable debt for producing this work, which in 2005 was re-issued in paperback to reach the wider audience it deserves.

Many of the conclusions in this study will be familiar to students of counterinsurgency in general and Afghanistan in particular. In the introduction, for example, the Russian authors bluntly state that the principal failure of the Soviet intervention was political, in the sense that the Soviet-backed Karmal regime never gained the support of the multi-ethnic Afghan population (p. 23). More practical military observations also abound throughout the book. Neither the Soviet Army nor its Afghan counterpart was adequately trained to fight the rebels, and many Soviet units remained road-bound, tied to their armored vehicles rather than pursuing the enemy into the mountains. The extreme altitudes of Afghanistan sharply diminished the lift capacity of helicopters, while ground supply convoys placed equal strains on the Soviet truck fleet. The Soviets tried and failed to make the Afghan Army bear the brunt of the military effort. When they did take the offensive, the Soviets attempted to identify and destroy the rebel command structure, not understanding that the mujahideen had little organization beyond tribal loyalties. Finally, the Soviet reluctance to fight at night meant that their operations had little effect on rebel mobility and logistics.

Yet other aspects of the book are less well known. According to the Russian authors, the 40th Soviet Army, the principal occupation force in Afghanistan, suffered moe than 26,000 dead during the ten years (1979-1989) of the conflict (p. 43). This contrasts markedly with official figures of 11,321 dead for all Soviet armed forces.[1] Most of the 329 helicopters lost in Afghanistan were victims not just of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, but even more of poor crew training and overuse of the aircraft and pilots (p. 221). In addition, the editors have added numerous facts supporting the significant but unacknowledged Soviet involvement in Afghanistan before their 1979 intervention (pp. xxiii, 209.)

In short, this is a superb study on a topic of considerable current interest. Some of the problems identified in logistics, training, and operations may be too detailed to interest the general reader or historian, but students of military operations and of the current struggles in the Middle East will find such details fascinating. The skillful translation and editorial comments of this version alleviate the traditionally ponderous style of Russian military writing, and the result is eminently readable. Overall, The Soviet-Afghan War deserves the widest dissemination among soldiers, historians, and the general public.

Note

[1]. See, for example, G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill Books and Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 287.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson. Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xvi + 506 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-7006-1240-6.

Reviewed by: Russell Parkin, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Army Land Warfare Studies Centre.

Published by: H-War (January, 2006)

Books about air power frequently fall into two broad categories. They are either general histories, such as Robin Higham's excellent Air Power: A Concise History (1972) and more recently, Stephen Budiansky's Air Power (2003), or specialist studies, such as the two superb volumes edited by Benjamin Franklin Cooling of the United States Air Force Center for Air Force History, Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support (1990) and Case Studies in Achievement of Air Superiority (1991). Corum and Johnson's Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists is definitely in the second category. The work is a detailed study of nine conflicts in which airpower was employed to combat a range of foes including bandits, insurgents and terrorists. The obvious benefit of this approach is the use of a comparative methodology not possible in other specialist works on the subject, such as David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control (1990).

Methodology is indeed one of this book's great strengths, allowing the authors to provide the reader with a broad picture of how air power, ground forces, diplomacy, aid and other factors have been employed to combat insurgents. Creating this picture is made easier by the use of a similar format for each of the chapters, which provide the reader with the political and strategic background to the conflict and then assess tactics employed and the lessons learned or not learned by the air forces involved. The nine case studies span the twentieth century from the period of World War I, to the use of air control techniques between the two world wars, and then to the post-World War II campaigns in Greece, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Vietnam, southern Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Extensive notes that provide a wealth of detail have been placed at the end of the book. There is also a short bibliographical essay as a guide to further reading. Both of these features are worthwhile additions to the work.

While the scope of the book is ambitious, the authors succeed in their aim of providing "military officers [and] policy makers … with a useful analysis of the historical experience of airpower in conflicts less than general war" (p. xi). The success of the study is largely due to the fact that both authors are experienced military professionals, historians and teachers. Corum is a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, currently teaching at the U.S. Army War College, while Johnson is a retired U.S. Air Force (USAF) colonel with a background in special operations and now a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University. This book grew out of their mutual frustration at the lack of suitable material for their students when they were teaching a course entitled, "Airpower in Small Wars" at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies (SAAS), part of the USAF's Air University.

The final chapter is a list of eleven specific lessons that have been drawn from the case studies. These lessons range from the need for a comprehensive strategy to outlining the best roles for air power in small wars: reconnaissance and transport. The authors also stress the requirement to employ both high- and low-tech air assets, the need for effective joint operations, and the need for specific training for this type of mission. However, in the current context of asymmetric operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the two most important lessons would seem to be the need for a comprehensive strategy and recognition of the fact that small wars are protracted affairs, involving extensive use of a variety of intelligence assets. Importantly, the work ends with a plea for the U.S. military education system to devote more time to the study of small wars and counterinsurgency operations that would enable the U.S. forces to arrive at doctrines and procedures more suitable to these operations than the current conventional strategies.

Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists is both a very valuable professional text and a wide-ranging history that outlines the evolution of this highly specialized use of air power. For this reviewer, Corum and Johnson's study strongly underlines the requirement for a comprehensive strategy--what Australian security planners now refer to as a whole-of-government approach--to deal with the problems posed by asymmetric operations. The case studies and lessons discussed in this book are reinforced by Australia's recent experience in the Solomon Islands. The first step to resolving the security situation in the Solomons did not require a conventional military response, but rather intelligent policies supported by a range of military assets.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xiii + 277 pp. Appendix, bibliography, notes, index., ISBN 978-0-8071-2806-0.

Reviewed by: Janet Leigh Bucklew, The National Museum of Civil War Medicine.

Published by: H-Minerva (July, 2005)

The recent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the strengths and contributions of women in combat. As we celebrate their bravery and sacrifice in the field, we are reminded that many of these women have left behind more than their civilian responsibilities. They have been separated from their children and significant others. However, we forget that in the past women served their country in a war where they had to resort to subterfuge in order to fulfill their desire to fight for the beliefs and the individuals they held dear. They also fought for a country that extended no rights or privileges to them regardless of their service and sacrifice.

During the American Civil War, many determined women enlisted in the Confederate and Union armies. Strong-minded and strong-willed women chose not to remain at home, weep, and wait for their absent loved ones. They joined the military. As DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook point out, these women enlisted for many reasons. They enlisted for the adventure, a steady paycheck, to be with their loved ones, and for countless other reasons. They cut their hair, put on men's clothing and were able to slip past the enlistment officers. These women then embarked on the adventure of their lives.

Blanton and Cook have meticulously researched women who fought during the war in the uniform of a male soldier. Their research has brought to light the stories of an incredible number of women who were determined not to stay at home and remain passive bystanders during the war. A few of the women are well-known to students of nineteenth-century women's history. Due to notoriety they might have received in the press and through pension records, some have detailed stories of their experiences. A few, like Sara Edmonds and Loreta Janeta Velaquez, wrote of their exploits and became well-known even while the war was in progress. Others may have told their family members, while many never spoke of their service.

In today's rigorous enlistment process, it is difficult to understand how women could have passed the physical examination and still maintain the secrecy of their gender. The authors have been diligent in describing the military and cultural loopholes that occurred that made female service possible. What may come as a surprise to readers is the response of the many male soldiers who discovered there was a woman in their ranks. These comrades-in-arms often helped hide the identity of the women and supported their desire to serve.

Blanton and Cook have combined the true story of these remarkable women without making excuses for them or attempting to cover their sins and mishaps. When possible, they have followed the women through their lives and given us a conclusion to their stories. The authors have ensured that these remarkable individuals are not left in the purgatory of history. Their stories have a beginning and an end. This information is important. We can now compare their Civil War experiences with those of women who have served and are currently serving in the military. Issues such as reentry into civilian culture and post-traumatic syndrome can be discussed.

It is important for military historians and Civil War buffs to acknowledge the presence and contributions of the female soldier during the Civil War. In the past, it has been possible to visit a Civil War battlefield and never hear the story of the many women who stepped outside the threshold of nineteenth-century decorum and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their male comrades in the regiment. As battlefield interpretation changes, this book will be a great resource for interpreters and visitors alike.

Women historians and individuals interested in women's history have had to search many avenues to find the information compiled in this one volume. Researchers everywhere are indebted to Blanton and Cook for their painstaking work. They have done more than just present their research in a readable format. They have created a wonderful reference work that has already been compared to Bell Wiley's Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. In doing so, they have honored the military service of these women warriors and dismissed the myths surrounding the motives that led them to enlist. No higher complement can be paid to the female soldiers of the Civil War.


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## archade (Aug 13, 2008)

Kevin Dougherty. Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xi + 207 pp. Illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-1-57806-968-2.

Reviewed by: John C. Waugh, Independent Scholar.



Learning about War in Mexico

The fact that most of the great generals in the Civil War on both sides apprenticed for high command in the U.S.-Mexican War is well known, but little written about. Kevin Dougherty has stepped into that gap with this admirable effort.

"The reach of the Mexican War experience into the Civil War is undeniably powerful" Dougherty writes (p. viii). However, he is aware that the "reach" is not necessarily easy to document. It is often difficult to prove that a tactic or characteristic of a commander in the Civil War tracks directly to his Mexican War experience, was intrinsic to his character to begin with, or was learned somewhere else.

Dougherty makes a pioneering effort to sort it out. Picking thirteen commanders each from the Union and Confederate sides, he attempts to tie their behavior in the Civil War directly to their Mexican War experience. In some cases the parallels and carry-overs are persuasive and apt, and in some cases they are themselves something of a "reach."

West Pointer after West Pointer flocked to the Mexican War when it broke out in 1846. Most were young subalterns then--some of them fresh out of the academy--and when they went to Mexico, they in effect went to postgraduate school in how to wage--or not wage--war on a large scale. Serving under two great mentors, Generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, they saw how those two commanders engineered their long uninterrupted string of victories against much larger Mexican armies and strikingly adverse odds.

Dougherty notes that all of these young subalterns saw how it was done, what worked and did not work. Many carried what they saw and learned into the Civil War, for better or for worse, when they themselves were suddenly elevated to high command over armies of unprecedented size a decade and a half later. Some applied what they had learned successfully. Some did not. Some profited from their Mexican War experience. Some did not.

One of those who did, Ulysses S. Grant, believed perhaps the most important legacy of the Mexican War was what these officers-cum-generals learned about one another. He told the journalist John Russell Young years later, "The Mexican War made the officers of the old regular armies more or less acquainted, and when we knew the name of the general opposing we knew enough about him to make our plans accordingly. What determined my attack on [Fort] Donelson was as much the knowledge I had gained of its commanders in Mexico as anything else."[1]

But again some used what they knew about one another to their advantage in the Civil War, some did not. Those who did more often than not succeeded. Those who did not more often than not failed.

Among the commanders Dougherty showcases are four of the most famous--Union generals George B. McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, all of whom distinguished themselves as subalterns in the Mexican War.

McClellan for a time commanded all of the Union armies. The most notable lesson he carried over from his Mexican War experience was a fondness for sieges, rooted in an admiration of the one Winfield Scott clamped on Vera Cruz prior to his march up the National Road to Mexico City. This fondness, coupled with a natural conservatism in battle, did not serve McClellan well. In his Peninsula Campaign in the Civil War in 1862 he mounted a month-long siege of Yorktown against inferior Confederate numbers when he should have boldly attacked.

What Lee, who served on Scott's staff with McClellan, brought to the Civil War from his Mexican War experience was entirely different. From Scott, Lee learned the enormous value of intelligent reconnaissance and the dramatic effect of a well-executed swift-striking flanking movement. In his storied career in the Civil War, Lee banked heavily on thorough reconnaissance. And his flanking movement at Chancellorsville against the Union army of Joseph Hooker is a classic of its kind, as telling as Scott's at Cerro Gordo.

In Mexico, Ulysses S. Grant, as a regimental supply officer, learned how to supply armies and twin logistics with maneuver to striking effect. From Scott he learned to shake free of ponderous multi-wagon supply trains when necessary and supply his armies off the land instead. It was a strategy he practiced in his victories before Vicksburg and passed on to his lieutenant, William Tecumseh Sherman, who applied it in his famed march from Atlanta to the sea in the final year of the Civil War.

Dougherty argues that what Jackson learned in the Mexican War had to be unlearned in the Civil War. A heroic young gunnery officer, Jackson learned to use artillery as an attack weapon in Mexico. But in the face of the Civil War's more lethal weaponry, that no longer worked. By then artillery had become largely a defensive weapon. There were lessons Jackson, a quick study, learned in the Mexican War that Dougherty could have better used. Like Lee, Jackson learned the priceless value of a swift-striking flanking movement and applied that lesson brilliantly in his electric Shenandoah Valley campaign, and in commanding the great flanking movement under Lee at Chancellorsville.

Among the other Union commanders whom Dougherty cites as having learned lessons in Mexico--and makes a good case for--are Navy Admiral Samuel Du Pont, and generals William T. Sherman, John Pope, Gordon Meade, Joseph Hooker, Henry Halleck, Henry Hunt, and George Thomas.

Dupont, Dougherty argues, was among the sea captains who conducted a limited naval blockade of Mexican ports, which he carried over, expanded, and used to effect in the Union blockade of Southern ports in the Civil War.

Sherman learned during the Mexican War how much he did not know and acted on that lesson in the Civil War. He was stationed in California and saw no fighting in the Mexican War. Lacking seasoning by fire, he wisely, unlike many of his fellow officers, opted for a lower rank at the beginning of the Civil War, knowing he was not fully ready for higher command.

Pope in Mexico saw and rather admired the hard-handed policy toward civilians that Taylor's rather lax discipline permitted, and found to his grief that it did not work when he tried to apply it to Virginians in the Civil War. It turned out to be the wrong lesson learned.

Meade watched Zachary Taylor fail to follow up and destroy the enemy after his hard and exhausting victory at Monterey in the Mexican War and embraced the example after his own exhausting victory at Gettysburg in the Civil War. This outraged President Lincoln just as Taylor's pulling back had enraged President James Polk a decade and a half earlier.

Hooker learned military management in Mexico and used it to great effect to reorganize the Union armies before Chancellorsville in 1863. But at Chancellorsville his army fell victim to what Lee and Jackson remembered and Hooker forgot about swift flanking movements.

Halleck also mastered military management in the Mexican War, a talent he applied as chief of staff--with somewhat mixed results--in support of Lincoln and later Grant in the Civil War.

Hunt served an artillery apprenticeship in the Mexican War and parlayed a talent for commanding massed artillery to great effect in the Union Army of the Potomac in the Civil War.

Thomas learned stoicism under fire as "Old Reliable" in the Mexican War and parlayed it into fame as the "Rock of Chickamauga" in the Civil War. But whether this had to do with anything he learned, rather than who he was, is debatable. Thomas had also seen that Taylor, an otherwise successful general, left too much to chance. Thomas would leave nothing to chance in the Civil War (even though it earned him the nickname "Old Slow Trot").

In two other of Dougherty's Union examples, the parallels are less clear. He argues that Philip Kearney learned his fearless, reckless approach to war in Mexico. But it can be argued that reckless and fearless was simply Kearney's nature--he was born that way. Dougherty argues that Winfield Scott learned and waged outdated limited war in Mexico and wrong-headedly wanted to wage it again in the Civil War with his Anaconda Plan of surrounding and squeezing the Confederacy into submission. Scott was one of the most brilliant generals in American history. It could be argued that Mexico or no Mexico Scott would have arrived at that strategy. It was indeed a plan similar to his that in the end won the war for the Union.

Dougherty's Confederate cases are also a mixture of the persuasive and not so persuasive. James Longstreet endured a heavy dose of costly offensive warfare in Mexico, and was seriously wounded in the charge at Chapultepec. Dougherty argues that it turned him into a strong advocate of defensive warfare in the Civil War, famously employing it at Fredericksburg and unsuccessfully urging it on Lee at Gettysburg.

George Pickett, leading charges alongside Longstreet in Mexico, brought to the Civil War just the opposite impulse. Unwounded at Chapultepec, he became, unlike his friend, enamored of the heroic charge in which he could plant the flag on enemy works. His fate at Gettysburg was to lead perhaps the most famously disastrous charge of the Civil War.

Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, a West Pointer, learned overconfidence in his own military ability as a colonel of Mississippi Rifles under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. It became a liability for the Confederacy in the Civil War. But whether it was something learned in Mexico, as Dougherty argues, or was just his nature, is arguable.

Braxton Bragg learned to be a strict disciplinarian in Mexico and found it did not work with the volunteer Confederate armies in the Civil War. So he became one of the most noted failures in the War of Brothers.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, unlike most who fought in Mexico, was not a fan of flanking movements, believing they worked in the Mexican War only because of an inept enemy. Instead he carried his deeply instilled preference for the traditional massed frontal attack into the Civil War.

John Pemberton, serving as an aide to General William Jenkins Worth in Mexico, a commander noted in part for his inflexibility, borrowed that trait in his defense of Vicksburg against Grant in the Civil War.Because of his inflexibility, Dougherty believes, Pemberton "failed to shift his main effort from defending Vicksburg to defeating Grant when the situation required" (p. 172).

A. P. Hill, hot-headed and flash-tempered, criticized his fellow officers unsparingly as a lieutenant in the Mexican War and did the same thing as a lieutenant general in the Civil War. But whether that was learned in Mexico or was just the way Hill was is also debatable.

Gideon Pillow, a political general in the Mexican War, learned nothing from it and carried his ignorance into the Civil War as a Confederate general with disastrous results. John Slidell endured failed diplomacy in Mexico, and endured it again as the Confederate envoy to France in the Civil War. Why Dougherty includes them in his study is somewhat puzzling. Pillow, it seems, had congenital military ineptness having nothing to do with Mexico, and Slidell faced two hopeless missions.

But these caveats do not downgrade Dougherty's accomplishment. He claims the book's aim is merely to argue the importance and usefulness of the Mexican War in understanding the Civil War and show that different men took different lessons from one war into the other. He has done that very nicely.

Note

[1]. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant, ed. Michael Fellman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 391.


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## archade (Sep 21, 2008)

Alexander Antonovich Liakhovsky. "Inside the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the Seizure of Kabul, December 1979." Trans. Gary Goldberg and Artemy Kalinovsky. CWIHP Working Paper 51, January 2007.



Reviewed by Tom Nichols, Naval War College [1] 


This working paper (a small book, really, at 76 single-spaced pages) from the Cold War International History Project is a solid example of why the CWIHP has become an indispensable source of material and analysis for scholars of the Cold War. Until the late 1980s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was often the source of guesswork and controversy, and even now there are significant gaps in our knowledge of this history-changing moment. In this study, a senior veteran and scholar of the Soviet Armed Forces presents, in great detail, events ranging from top secret discussions in the Kremlin to firefights in the streets of Kabul. 


It is not a complete account, but that is probably impossible at this point in history, and it will no doubt be some time before such a synoptic volume might be written about even the first part of the war. But Liakhovsky's paper-which draws on his own books and primary research on the subject-manages to clarify some pressing questions, and particularly the question of how this disastrous decision was made. 

Liakhovsky's study is really a two-part project. In the first part, he examines the cascade of anxieties, misinformation, fears, and eventual decisions that led to Soviet troops receiving their orders to Kabul. In the second part, he takes the reader to a ground-level, operational excursion, replete with dramatic and very human first-accounts, into the taking of Kabul and the toppling of the Afghan regime. 


This latter half of the study is likely to be of more use to military historians, particularly those interested in reconstructing the combat operations of Soviet special forces during the invasion. But the first half of Liakhovsky's paper contains rich material and analysis for students of politics and international relations, and sheds light on questions beyond the invasion itself (such as the nature of Soviet civil-military relations, to name but one).


One of the most important realizations to be found in the Liakhovsky study is the degree to which the invasion was driven by internal Soviet political dynamics, and far less by actual events in the international sphere. The closed circles of decision making, the conspiratorial nature of Politburo politics, the poor flow of information, and the rejection of expert advice in favor of preconceptions (often ideologically constructed) reveal a completely dysfunctional policymaking environment in Moscow, one that had already shown itself incapable of dealing with far less complicated problems than Afghanistan.


Some might argue that there are obvious parallels here with American decisions regarding intervention in Iraq (and maybe even Vietnam). And there is, unfortunately, a certain uncomfortable symmetry to be seen, particularly in the filtering out of uncongenial information and the lack of planning for "the morning after." But the parallels between a drama that drew the world's democracies into open debate with each other, and a quiet conspiracy that involved perhaps only a few dozen men in Moscow and Kabul, should not be overdrawn. 


One major difference here is that the Soviet Union was intervening against a friend, not a sworn enemy, and that was part of the Kremlin's dilemma. Moscow's "ally" in Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was himself responsible for creating violent fissures in his own country, and Liakhovsky is unsparing in his depiction of Amin as little more than a thug. By late 1979, for example, Liakhovsky estimates that Amin's attempts to use repeated purges to stay in power probably cost 50,000 lives or more, which horrified even the Soviets. (3) When a fundamentally repressive organization like the Soviet Communist Party starts sending urgent appeals to "stop the repressions" and obey "the rule of law," it is a sure sign that things have gone awry.


Amin's brutality placed the Soviets in a bind, as it made his continued rule impossible. (Liakhovsky even quotes a note from the U.S. Embassy, written as bystanders who "have been observing for 18 months how this Marxist party [the PDPA] has been destroying itself.") But Amin's answer to the deterioration in the situation was to exercise yet more brutality, arguing for "entire tribes" to be bombed into dust: "You don't know our people," he tells the Soviets. "The only solution is to destroy them all, from big to small!" (4) 


Worse, while Soviet leaders were quite right to see Amin as "unreliable"-his grip on the country was slipping away, no matter how many people he killed-they also somehow got it into their heads that he might have some sort of association with the Central Intelligence Agency, and that he could "realign" himself at "at any moment" with the West. The provenance of this charge is unclear, and Liakhovsky seems mostly unconvinced of its truth. While he does not reach an unequivocal judgment on it, he notes that if Amin were in fact a CIA asset, he did not admit to it or use it to try to save himself, even in the last hours of his life during the battle to remove and kill him. (61) 


 In any case, it is clear that by early autumn of 1979, a small circle of Soviet leaders had made the decision that Amin had to go. Not only did they distrust and dislike him (and Brezhnev in particular was angered by Amin's murder of his predecessor, Taraki), but as a practical matter Afghanistan was collapsing into civil war. Liakhovsky identifies KGB chief Yuri Andropov as the prime mover behind the idea that Amin could be struck quickly and replaced with Moscow's new favorite, Babrak Karmal. There were apparently assassination plots-Liakhovsky mentions that the KGB claimed to have a plan to "counteract" Amin-and there is a reference to, but no explanation of, the mysterious suicide of Soviet Lt. Gen. Paputin after a mission of some sort to Kabul in November 1979. (8) Whatever the KGB's plans, however, by December Amin was still alive and Andropov was pushing harder for a military-that is, KGB-led-solution, leading Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov to note wryly: "You're quite the adventurist, Yura." (12 )

Liakhovsky is careful to take the reader through the complicated dance of Soviet memo-writing, explaining why certain leaders would sign particular reports, and so on. What emerges from the documents is that Soviet policy on the crisis in Afghanistan was the work of a cabal of three or four men-Andropov, Ustinov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a few others-who were carefully managing the decisions of the now-ill Leonid Brezhnev. 

The Soviet high command, for its part, could see an intervention looming, and General Staff chief Gen. Nikolai Ogarkov in particular is depicted as making a last-ditch effort to persuade the Defense Minister to derail the plan in the Politburo. This finally led to a dressing down from Ustinov, who imperiously shouted at Ogarkov: "Are you going to teach the Politburo? You must carry out orders. You're always building intrigues! You're systematically sabotaging my decisions...What gets decided in the Politburo is none of your business." Later, Andropov piled on. When Ogarkov warned that all of eastern Islam could turn against the USSR over the invasion, Andropov interrupted him: "Mind your own business! Politics will be taken care of by us, the party, [and] Leonid Illyich [Brezhnev]!" (18) 


This episode is at odds with previous images of the Soviet civil-military relationship as more harmonious or coordinated. (I am forced to include my own work on Soviet civil-military relations here, in which I asserted that senior Soviet military leaders were far more powerful than Liakhovsky's account suggests.) Indeed, the Soviet military overall comes out quite well in Liakhovsky's telling; whether this is a bias on Liakhovsky's part (himself a military professional) is hard to know. But if his portrait of the Soviet leadership as resistant to military advice is accurate, it would explain a lot not only about the decisions leading up to the invasion but also about some of the personnel shuffles that came after it, some of which were puzzling to Sovietologists of the time, such as Ogarkov's eventual demotion in 1984 (which Liakhovsky claims is traceable back to the debates of late 1979).


While there is much more in this article, especially for historians trying to reconstruct the inner workings of the Soviet elite, a few other points emerge from Liakhovsky's study that are worth further reflection. 


First, there is the distorting role of ideology in the Kremlin's decision making. Liakhovsky shows how the political importance of Afghanistan grew to meet the military resources that were being devoted to the operation, especially once the Soviet leadership decided, against all logic and evidence, that "events in [Afghanistan] had become part of a world 
revolutionary process." (13) Liakhovsky-rightly, in my view-rejects the criticism that Brezhnev and his circle were "fools." Rather, trapped by their own ideological beliefs, they "were simply placed in conditions where they could not fail to support a 'fraternal' Party; our allies, the other Communist parties, would not have understood this." (A similar explanation could be made for Soviet involvement in Vietnam, as the work of Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk suggests.)[2] "For a long time," Liakhovsky writes, "the foreign security policy [sic] of the USSR was constructed to a considerable degree on the basis of ideological dogmas." (29) This is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the influence of ideology on foreign policy, particularly in the Soviet Union. 


A second and related point is how idiosyncratically the isolated leaders of the Kremlin perceived and processed external events. Liakhovsky tells us, for example, that Brezhnev and his circle saw the late 1979 NATO decision to deploy Pershing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe as the final event tipping the situation in Afghanistan toward intervention; the Kremlin felt it had "nothing left to lose," and Soviet leaders were gripped by bizarre fears of U.S. Pershing deployments in Afghanistan that would in turn threaten assets like the Baikonur cosmodrome (as though somehow a spaceport in Central Asia would be a major target during a Soviet-American nuclear exchange). (17) 


There is an irony here, in that the inner Kremlin circle-by 1979 quite used to exercising Soviet power unhindered by foreign or domestic constraints-seemed to have had no concept of how their actions would be interpreted beyond the bubble of the Moscow Ring Road. More important, they did not seem to grasp how their own actions could bring about the very Western reactions they feared most. Many former Soviet officials, 
including Georgii Arbatov and even Mikhail Gorbachev himself, later ruminated on the short-sightedness of Soviet leaders in the 1970s, with the SS-20 deployments and the invasion of Afghanistan the worst examples of such myopia.


Perhaps the most poignant observation Liakhovsky makes us when he notes that the Politburo, on the eve of the invasion, never asked themselves the most important question: "[W]hat revolution had they gathered to defend?" (23)


While there are some distracting lapses in the editing, including what seems to be a few awkwardly translated passages, and a fair number of typographical errors, this article is engrossing, especially in the first half, and will be of interest to specialists and general readers alike, although the latter part will be of more interest to those with a particular interest in Soviet military operations. A. A. Liakhovsky's study is a major addition to our knowledge on the subject, and should be read by anyone trying to understand the decision that proved to be one of the crucial turning points along the Soviet Union's road to 
 self-destruction. 

Thomas M. Nichols is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI, where he holds the Forrest Sherman Chair in Public Diplomacy. He is also a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City. His most recent book, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War was published in February 2008 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. During the 2008/09 academic year he will be a Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, holding a joint appointment in both the International Security Program and Harvard's "Project on Managing the Atom," a program related to issues of nuclear weapons and  nonproliferation.


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## archade (Oct 15, 2008)

The Quranic Concept of War

JOSEPH C. MYERS



“The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military. . . . The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.”2
                                                           — Majid Khadduri

Political and military leaders are notoriously averse to theory, but if there is a theorist about war who matters, it remains Carl von Clausewitz, whose Vom Kriege (On War) has shaped Western views about war since the middle of the nineteenth century.”3 Both points are likely true and problematic since we find ourselves engaged in war with people not solely imbued with western ideas and values or followers of western military theorists. The Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry recently stated, “Four years into the war on terror, US intelligence officials tell me there are no baseline studies of the Muslim prophet Muhammad or his ideological or military doctrine found at either the CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, or even the war colleges.”4

Would this be surprising? When it comes to warfighting military audiences tend to focus on the military and power aspects of warfare; the tangibles of terrain, enemy, weather, leadership, and troops; quantifiables such as the number of tanks and artillery tubes—the correlation of forces. Analysts steer toward the familiar rather than the unfamiliar; people tend to think in their comfort zones. The study of ideology or philosophy is often brushed aside, it’s not the “stuff of muddy boots;” it is more cerebral than physical and not action oriented. Planners do not assess the “correlation of ideas.” The practitioners are too busy.

Dr. Antulio Echevarria recently argued the US military does not have a doctrine for war as much as it has a doctrine for operations and battles.5 The military has a deficit of strategic, and, one could add, philosophic thinking. In the war against Islamist terrorism, how many have heard of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project”?6 Is the political philosophy of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in fact well-grounded in western political theory and rigorously rejected it, studied in our military schools? Are there any implications to his statement in 1981 that “Iran . . . is determined to propagate Islam to the whole world”?7

To understand war, one has to study its philosophy; the grammar and logic of your opponent. Only then are you approaching strategic comprehension. To understand the war against Islamist terrorism one must begin to understand the Islamic way of war, its philosophy and doctrine, the meanings of jihad in Islam—and one needs to understand that those meanings are highly varied and utilitarian depending on the source.

With respect to the war against the global jihad and its associated terror groups, individual terrorists, and clandestine adherents, one should ask if there is a unique method or attitude to their approach to war. Is there a philosophy, or treatise such as Clausewitz’s On War that attempts to form their thinking about war? Is there a document that can be reviewed and understood in such a manner that we may begin to think strategically about our opponent. There is one work that stands out from the many.

The Quranic Concept of War

The Quranic Concept of War, by Brigadier General S. K. Malik of the Pakistani Army provides readers with unequalled insight. Originally published in Pakistan in 1979, most available copies are found in India, or in small non-descript Muslim bookstores.8 One major point to ponder, when thinking about The Quranic Concept of War, is the title itself. The Quran is presumed to be the revealed word of God as spoken through his chosen prophet, Mohammed. According to Malik, the Quran places warfighting doctrine and its theory in a much different category than western thinkers are accustomed to, because it is not a theory of war derived by man, but of God. This is God’s warfighting principles and commandments revealed. Malik’s attempts to distill God’s doctrine for war through the examples of the Prophet. By contrast, the closest that Clausewitz comes to divine presentation is in his discussion of the trinity: the people, the state, and the military. In the Islamic context, the discussion of war is at the level of revealed truth and example, well above theory—God has no need to theorize. Malik notes, “As a complete Code of Life, the Holy Quran gives us a philosophy of war as well. . . . This divine philosophy is an integral part of the total Quranic ideology.”9

Historiography

In The Quranic Concept of War, Malik seeks to instruct readers in the uniquely important doctrinal aspects of Quranic warfare. The Quranic approach to war is “infinitely supreme and effective . . . [and] points towards the realization of universal peace and justice . . . and makes maximum allowance to its adversaries to co-operate [with Islam] in a combined search for a just and peaceful order.”10 For purposes of this review, the term “doctrine” refers to both religious and broad strategic approaches, not methods and procedures. Malik’s work is a treatise with historical, political, legalistic, and moralistic ramifications on Islamic warfare. It seemingly is without parallel in the western sense of warfare since the “Quran is a source of eternal guidance for mankind.”11

The approach is not new to Islamists and other jihad theorists fighting according to the “Method of Mohammed” or hadith. The lessons learned are recorded and form an important part of Quranic surah and jihadist’s scholarship.12 Islamic scholars both Muslim and non-Muslim will find much to debate in terms of Malik’s view of jihad doctrine and Quranic warfare. Malik’s work is essentially modern scholarship; although he does acknowledge the classical views of jihad in many respects.13

Malik’s arguments are clearly parochial, often more editorial than scholarly, and his tone is decidedly confident and occasionally supremacist. The reach and influence of the author’s work is not clear although one might believe that given the idealism of his treatise, his approaches to warfare, and the role and ends of “terror” his text may resonate with extremist and radicals prone to use terroristic violence to accomplish their ends. For that reason alone, the book is worth studying.

Introduction

The preface by Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, the former Pakistani ambassador to India, offers important insights into Malik’s exposition. In fact, Brohi’s 13-page preface lays the foundation for the books ten chapters. Malik places Quranic warfare in an academic context relative to that used by western theorists. He analyzes the causes and objects of war, as well as war’s nature and dimensions. He then turns attention to the ethics and strategy of warfare. Toward the end of the book he reviews the exercise of Quranic warfare based on the examples of the Prophet Mohammed’s military campaigns and concludes with summary observations. There are important jus en bellum and jus ad bellum implications in the author’s writings, as well as in his controversial ideas related to the means and objectives of war. It is these concepts that warrant the attention of planners and strategist.

Zia-Ul-Haq (1924-88), the former President of Pakistan and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff, opens the book by focusing on the concept of jihad within Islam and explaining it is not simply the domain of the military:

    Jehad fi sabilallah is not the exclusive domain of the professional soldier, nor is it restricted to the application of military force alone.

    This book brings out with simplicity, clarity and precision the Quranic philosophy on the application of military force within the context of the totality that is JEHAD. The professional soldier in a Muslim army, pursuing the goals of a Muslim state, cannot become ‘professional’ if in all his activities he does not take the ‘colour of Allah,’ The nonmilitary citizen of a Muslin state must, likewise, be aware of the kind of soldier that his country must produce and the only pattern of war that his country’s armed forces may wage.14

General Zia states that all Muslims play a role in jihad, a mainstream concept of the Quran, that jihad in terms of warfare is a collective responsibility of the Muslim ummah, and is not restricted to soldiers. General Zia emphasizes how the concept of Islamic military professionalism requires “godly character” in order to be fully achieved. Zia then endorses Malik’s thesis as the “only pattern of war,” or approach to war that an Islamic state may wage.

Battling Counter-initiatory Forces

In the preface Ambassador Brohi details what might be startling to many readers. He states that Malik has made “a valuable contribution to Islamic jurisprudence” or Islamic law, and an “analytic restatement of the Quranic wisdom on the subject of war and peace.” Brohi implies that Malik’s discussion, though a valuable new version, is an approach to a theme already well developed.15

Brohi then defines jihad, “The most glorious word in the Vocabulary of Islam is Jehad, a word which is untranslatable in English but, broadly speaking, means ‘striving’, ‘struggling’, ‘trying’ to advance the Divine causes or purposes.” He introduces a somewhat cryptic concept when he explains man’s role in a “Quranic setting” as energetically combating forces of evil or what may be called, “counter-initiatory” forces which are at war with the harmony and the purpose of life on earth.16 For the true Muslin the harmony and purpose in life are only possible through man’s ultimate submission to God’s will, that all will come to know, recognize, and profess Mohammed as the Prophet of God. Man must recognize the last days and acknowledge tawhid, the oneness of God.17

Brohi recounts the classic dualisms of Islamic theology; that the world is a place of struggle between good and evil, between right and wrong, between Haq and Na-Haq (truth and untruth), and between halal and haram (legitimate and forbidden). According to Brohi, it is the duty of man to opt for goodness and reject evil. Brohi appeals to the “greater jihad,” a post-classical jihad doctrine developed by the mystical Sufi order and other Shia scholars.18

Brohi places jihad in the context of communal if not imperial obligation; both controversial formulations:

    When a believer sees that someone is trying to obstruct another believer from traveling the road that leads to God, spirit of Jehad requires that such a man who is imposing obstacles should be prevented from doing so and the obstacles placed by him should also be removed, so that mankind may be freely able to negotiate its own path that leads to Heaven.” To do otherwise, “by not striving to clear or straighten the path we [Muslims] become passive spectators of the counter-initiatory forces imposing a blockade in the way of those who mean to keep their faith with God.19

This viewpoint appears to reflect the classic, collective duty within jihad doctrine, to defend the Islamic community from threats—the concept of defensive jihad. Brohi is saying much more than that; however, he is attempting to delineate the duty—the proactive duty—to clear the path for Islam. It is necessary not only to defend the individual believer if he is being hindered in his faith, but also to remove the obstacles of those counter-initiatory forces hindering his Islamic development. This begs the question of what is actually meant by the initiatory forces. The answer is clear to Brohi; the force of initiative is Islam and its Muslim members. “It is the duty of a believer to carry forward the Message of God and to bring it to notice of his fellow-men in handsome ways. But if someone attempts to obstruct him from doing so he is entitled as a matter of defense, to retaliate.”20

This formulation would appear to turn the concept of defense on its head. To the extent that a Muslim may proclaim Islam and proselytize, or Islam, as a faith, seeks to extend its invitation and reach—initiate its advance—but is unable to do so, then that represents an overt threat justifying—a defensive jihad. According to Brohi, this does not result in the “ordinary wars which mankind has been fighting for the sake of either revenge or for securing . . . more land or more booty . . . [this] striving must be [is] for the sake of God. Wars in the theory of Islam are . . . to advance God’s purposes on earth, and invariably they are defensive in character.” In other words, everywhere the message of God and Islam is or can be hindered from expansion, resisted or opposed by some “obstruction” (a term not clearly defined) Islam is intrinsically entitled to defend its manifest destiny.21

While his logic is controversial, Brohi is not unique in his extrapolation. His theory in fact reflects the argument of Rashid Rida, a conservative disciple of the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh. In 1913 Abduh published an article evaluating Islam’s early military campaigns and determined that Islam’s early neighbors “prevented the proclamation of truth” engendering the defense of Islam. “Our religion is not like others that defend themselves . . . but our defense of our religion is the proclamation of truth and the removal of distortion and misrepresentation of it.”22

No Nation is Sovereign

The exegesis of the term jihad is often debated. Some apologists make clear that nowhere in the Quran does the term “Holy War” exist; that is true, but it is also irrelevant. War in Islam is either just or unjust and that justness depends on the ends of war. Brohi, and later Malik, make clear that the ends of war in Islam or jihad are to fulfill God’s divine purpose. Not only should that be a holy purpose, it must be a just war in order to be “Holy War.”23

The next dualism Brohi presents is that of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the house of submission and the house of war. He describes the latter, as “perpetuating defiance of the Lord.” While explaining that conditions for war in Islam are limited (a constrained set of circumstances) he notes that “in Islam war is waged to establish supremacy of the Lord only when every other argument has failed to convince those who reject His will and work against the very purpose of the creation of mankind.”24 Brohi quotes the Quranic manuscript Surah, al-Tawba:

    Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.25

Acknowledging western critics who believe that Islam is in a state of perpetual struggle with the non-Islamic world, Brohi counters in a clearly dismissive tone by explaining that man is the slave to God, and defying God is treason under Islamic law. Those who defy God should be removed from humanity like a cancerous growth. Islam requires believers “to invite non-believers to the fold of Islam” by using “persuasion” and “beautiful methods.” He continues, “the first duty” of a Muslim is dawa, a proclamation to conversion by “handsome ways.” It is only after refusing dawa and the invitation to Islam that “believers have no option but in self-defense to wage a war against those threatening aggression.”

Obviously, much turns on how threats and aggression are characterized. It is difficult to understand, however, based on the structure of his argument, that Brohi views non-believers and their states as requiring conversion over time by peaceful means; and when that fails, by force. He is echoing the doctrine of Abd al-Salam Faraj, author of Al-Farida al-Ghaibah, better known as The Neglected Duty, a work that is widely read throughout the Muslim world.26

Finally, Brohi examines the concept of the ummah and the international system. “The idea of Ummah of Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, is incapable of being realized within the framework of territorial states.” This is a consistent view that underpins many works on the concept of the Islamic state.27 For Muslims, the ummah is a transcendent religious and cultural society united and reflecting the unity (tawhid) of Islam; the idea of one God, indivisible, one community, one belief, and one duty to live and become godly. According to the Prophet, “Ummah participates in this heritage by a set pattern of thought, belief and practice . . . and supplies the spiritual principle of integration of mankind—a principle which is supra-national, supra-racial, supra-linguistic and supra-territorial.”28

With respect to the “law of war and peace in Islam” Brohi writes it “is as old as the Quran itself. . . . ” In his analysis of the law of nations and their international dealings, he emphasizes that in “Islamic international law this conduct [war and peace] is, strictly speaking, regulated between Muslims and non-Muslims, there being, from Islamic perspective, no other nation. . . . ” In other words, war is between Muslims and non-Muslims and not in actuality between states. It is transnational. He adds, “In Islam, of course, no nation is sovereign since Allah alone is the only sovereign in Whom all authority vests.”29 Here Brohi is echoing what Islamic scholars such as Majid Khadduri have described as the “dualism of the universal religion and universal state that is Islam.”30

The Divine Philosophy on War

General Malik begins by categorizing human beings into three archetypes: those who fear Allah and profess the Faith; those who reject the Faith; and those who profess, but are treacherous in their hearts. Examples of the Prophet and the instructions to him by God in his early campaigns should be studied to fully understand these three examples in practice. The author highlights the fact that the “divine philosophy on war” was revealed gradually over a 12 year period, its earliest guidance dealing with the causes and objects of war, while later guidance focused on Quranic strategy, the conduct of war, and the ethical dimensions of warfare.31

In Chapter Three, Malik reviews several key thoughts espoused by western scholars related to the causes of war. He examines the ideologies of Lenin, Geoffery Blainey, Quincy Wright, and Frederick H. Hartman each of whom spoke about war in a historical or material context with respect to the nature of the state system. Malik finds these explanations wanting and turns to the Quran for explanation, “war could only be waged for the sake of justice, truth, law, and preservation of human society. . . . The central theme behind the causes of war . . . [in] the Holy Quran, was the cause of Allah.”32

The author recounts the progression of revelations by God to the Prophet that “granted the Muslims the permission to fight . . . .” Ultimately, God would compel and command Muslims to fight: “Fight in the cause of Allah.” In his analysis of this surah Malik highlights the fact that “new elements” were added to the causes of war: that in order to fight, Muslims must be “fought first;” Muslims are not to “transgress God’s limits” in the conduct of war; and everyone should understand that God views “tumult and oppression” of Muslims as “worse than slaughter.”33 This oppression was exemplified by the denial of Muslim’s right to worship at the Sacred Mosque by the early Arab Koraish, people of Mecca. Malik describes the situation in detail, “. . . the tiny Muslim community in Mecca was the object of the Koraish tyranny and oppression since the proclamation of Islam. . . . The enemy repression reached its zenith when the Koraish denied the Muslims access to the Sacred Mosque (the Ka’aba) to fulfill their religious obligations. This sacrilegious act amounted to an open declaration of war upon Islam. These actions eventually compelling the Muslims to migrate to Medina twelve years later, in 622 AD. . . .”34

Malik argues that the pagan Koraish tribe had no reason to prohibit Muslim worship, since the Muslims did not impede their form of worship. This historical example helps to further define the concept that “tumult and oppression is worse than slaughter” and as the Quran repeats, “graver is it in the sight of Allah to prevent access to the path of Allah, to deny Him, to prevent access to the Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members.” Malik also notes the Quran distinguishes those who fight “in the cause of Allah and those who reject Faith and fight in the cause of evil.”35 In terms of Quranic just war theory, war must be waged “only to fight the forces of tyranny and oppression.”36

Challenging Clausewitz’s notion that “policy” provides the context and boundary of war; Malik says it is the reverse, “‘war’ forced policy to define and determine its own parameters” and since that discussion focuses on parochial issues such as national interests, and the vagaries of state to state relations it is a lesser perspective. In the divine context of the Quran war orients on the spread of “justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere.” According to the author war is to be fought aggressively, slaughter is not the worst evil. In the course of war every opportunity for peace should be pursued and reciprocated. That is every remonstrance of peace by the enemies of Islam, but only as prescribed by the Quran’s “clear-cut philosophy and methodology” for preserving peace.37

Understanding the context in which the Quran describes and defines “justice and peace” is important. Malik refers the reader to the battle of Badr to elucidate these principles. There is peace with those pagans who cease hostilities, and war continues with those who refuse. He cites the following surah, “as long as these stand true to you, stand ye true to them, for Allah doth love the righteous.”38 Referring to the precedent setting Hodaibayya treaty in the ninth year of the hijra, or pilgrimages to Mecca, Malik outlines how Allah and the Prophet abrogated those treaties with the pagan Meccans.

Pagans who accepted terms voluntarily without a treaty were respected. Those who refused, the Quran directed, were to be slain wherever found. This precedent and “revelations commanded the Muslims to fulfill their treaty commitments for the contracted period but put them under no obligations to renew them.”39 It also established the precedent that Muslims may conclude treaties with non-believers, but only for a temporary period.40 Commenting on western approaches to peace, Malik views such approaches as not standing the “test of time” with no worthwhile role to play even in the future.41 The author’s point is that peace between states has only secular, not divine ends; and peace in an Islamic context is achieved only for the promotion of Islam.

As the Prophet gained control of Mecca he decreed that non-believers could assemble or watch over the Sacred Mosque. He later consolidated power over Arabia and many who had not yet accepted Islam, “including Christians and Jew, [they] were given the option to choose between war and submission.” These non-believers were required to pay a poll-tax or jizya and accept the status of dhimmitude [servitude to Islam] in order to continue practicing their faith. According to Malik the taxes were merely symbolic and insignificant. In summarizing this relationship the author states, “the object of war is to obtain conditions of peace, justice, and faith. To do so it is essential to destroy the forces of oppression and persecution.”42 This view is in keeping with that outlined by Khadduri, “The jihad, it will be recalled, regarded war as Islam’s instrument to transform the dar al-harb into dar al-Islam . . . in Islamic legal theory, the ultimate objective of Islam is not war per se, but the ultimate establishment of peace.”43

The Nature of War

Malik argues that the “nature and dimension of war” is the greatest single characteristic of Quranic warfare and distinguishes it from all other doctrines. He acknowledges Clausewitz’s contribution to the understanding of warfare in its moral and spiritual context. The moral forces of war, as Clausewitz declared, are perhaps the most important aspects in war. Reiterating that Muslims are required to wage war “with the spirit of religious duty and obligation,” the author makes it clear that in return for fighting in the way of Allah, divine, angelic assistance will be rendered to jihad warriors and armies. At this point The Quranic Concept of War moves beyond the metaphysical to the supernatural element, unlike anything found in western doctrine. Malik highlights the fact that divine assistance requires “divine standards” on the part of the warrior mujahideen for the promise of Allah’s aid to be met.44

The author then builds upon the jihad warrior’s role in the realms of divine cause, purpose, and support, to argue that in order for the Muslim warrior to be unmatched, to be the bravest and the most fearless; he can only do so through the correct spiritual preparation, beginning with total submission to God’s will. The Quran reveals that the moral forces are the “real issues involved in the planning and conduct of war.”45 Malik quotes the Quran: “Fighting is prescribed for you . . . and ye dislike a thing which is good for you and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”

The Quran instructs the jihad warrior “to fight . . . with total devotion and never contemplate a flight from the battlefield for fear of death.” The jihad warrior, who dies in the way of Allah, does not really die but lives on in heaven. Malik emphasizes this in several Quranic verses. “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. . . . Nay, they live finding their sustenance in the Presence of the Lord.” Malik also notes that “Not equal are those Believers . . . Allah has granted a higher grade to those who strive and fight . . . .”46

The Quranic dimensions of war are “revolutionary,” conferring on the jihad warrior a “personality so strong and overbearing as to prove themselves equal to, indeed dominate, every contingency in war.”47 This theme of spiritual preparation and pure belief has appeared in the prolific jihad writings of Usaman Dan Fodio in the early 1800s and repeated by the Saudi writer Abdallah al-Qadiri in 1992, both emphasizing the role of the “greater jihad.” Becoming a purer and more disciplined Muslim serves the cause of Islam better in peace and war.48

Malik, like Brohi, acknowledges critics who say that Islam has been “spread by the sword,” but he responds that Islam is spread through restraint in war and in “the use of force [that] have no parallel.” He then argues that restraint in warfare is a “two-sided affair.” Where the enemy (not defined) fails to exercise restraints and commits “excesses” (not defined) then “the very injunction of preserving and promoting peace and justice demands the use of limited force . . . . Islam permits the use of the sword for such purpose.”49 Since Malik is speaking in the context of active war and response to the “excesses of war” it is unclear what he means by “limited force” or response.

The author expands on the earlier ideas that moral and spiritual forces are predominate in war. He contrasts Islamic strategic approaches with western theories of warfare oriented toward the application of force, primarily in the military domain, as opposed to Islam where the focus is on a broader application of power. Power in Malik’s context is the power of jihad, which is total, both in the conduct of total war and in its supporting strategy; referred to as “total or grand strategy.” Malik provides the following definition, “Jehad is a continuous and never-ending struggle waged on all fronts including political, economic, social, psychological, domestic, moral and spiritual to attain the objectives of policy.”50 The power of jihad brings with it the power of God.

The Quranic concept of strategy is therefore divine theory. The examples and lessons to be derived from it may be found in the study of the classics, inspired by such events as the battles of the Prophet, e.g., Badr, Khandaq, Tabuk, and Hudaibiyya. Malik again references the divine assistance of Allah and the aid of angelic hosts. He refers to the battles of Hunain and Ohad as instances where seeming defeat was reversed and Allah “sent down Tranquility into the hearts of believers, that they may add Faith to their Faith.” Malik argues that divine providence steels the jihadi in war, “strengthens the hearts of Believers.” Calmness of faith, “assurance, hope, and tranquility” in the face of danger is the divine standard.51

Strike Terror into their Hearts

Malik uses examples to demonstrate that Allah will strike “terror into the hearts of Unbelievers.”52 At this point he begins to develop his most controversial and conjectural Quranic theory related to warfare—the role of terror. Readers need to understand that the author is thinking and writing in strategic terms, not in the vernacular of battles or engagements. Malik continues, “when God wishes to impose His will on his enemies, He chooses to do so by casting terror into their hearts.”53 He cites another verse, “against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts) of the enemies of Allah . . . .” Malik’s strategic synthesis is specific: “the Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, known or hidden, while guarding ourselves from being terror-stricken by the enemy.”54 Terror is an effect; the end-state.

Malik identifies the center of gravity in war as the “human heart, [man’s] soul, spirit, and Faith.” Note that Faith is capitalized, meaning more than simple moral courage or fortitude. Faith in this sense is in the domain of religious and spiritual faith; this is the center of gravity in war. The main weapon against this Islamic concept of center of gravity is “the strength of our own souls . . . [keeping] terror away from our own hearts.” In terms of achieving decisive and direct decisions preparing for this type of battlefield first requires “creating a wholesome respect for our Cause”—the cause of Islam. This “respect” must be seeded in advance of war and conflict in the minds of the enemies. Malik then introduces the informational, psychological, or perception management concepts of warfare. Echoing Sun Tzu, he states, that if properly prepared, the “war of muscle,” the physical war, will already be won by “the war of will.”55 “Respect” therefore is achieved psychologically by, as Brohi suggested earlier, “beautiful” and “handsome ways” or by the strategic application of terror.

When examining the theme of the preparatory stage of war, Malik talks of the “war of preparation being waged . . . in peace,” meaning that peacetime preparatory activities are in fact part of any war and “vastly more important than the active war.” This statement should not be taken lightly, it essentially means that Islam is in a perpetual state of war while peace can only be defined as the absence of active war. Malik argues that peace-time training efforts should be oriented on the active war(s) to come, in order to develop the Quranic and divine “Will” in the mujahid. When armies and soldiers find limited physical resources they should continue and emphasize the development of the “spiritual resources” as these are complimentary factors and create synergy for future military action.

Malik’s most controversial dictum is summarized in the following manner: in war, “the point where the means and the end meet” is in terror. He formulates terror as an objective principal of war; once terror is achieved the enemy reaches his culminating point. “Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose . . . .” Malik’s divine principal of Islamic warfare may be restated as “strike terror; never feel terror.” The ultimate objective of this form of warfare “revolves around the human heart, [the enemies] soul, spirit, and Faith.”56 Terror “can be instilled only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed . . . . It is essential in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate [the enemies] Faith.” Those who are firm in their religious conviction are immune to terror, “a weak Faith offers inroads to terror.” Therefore, as part of preparations for jihad, actions will be oriented on weakening the non-Islamic’s “Faith,” while strengthening the Islamic’s. What that weakening or “dislocation” entails in practice remains ambiguous. Malik concludes, “Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent.” The soul of man can only be touched by terror.57

Malik then moves to a more academic discussion of ten general categories inherent in the conduct of Islamic warfare. These categories are easily translatable and recognizable to most western theorists; planning, organization, and conduct of military operations. In this regard, the author offers no unique insight. His last chapter is used to restate his major conclusions, stressing that “The Holy Quran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test . . . lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of our enemies.”58

Evaluation of The Quranic Concept of War

While the extent and reach of Malik’s thesis cannot be confirmed in the Islamic world neither can it be discounted. Though controversial, his citations are accurately drawn from Islamic sources and consistent with classical Islamic jurisprudence.59 As Malik notes, “Quranic military thought is an integral and inseparable part of the total Quranic message.”60 Policy planners and strategists striving to understand the nature of the “Long War” should consider Malik’s writings in that light.

Malik makes clear that the Quran provides the doctrine, guidance, and examples for the conduct of Quranic or Islamic warfare. “It gives a strategy of war that penetrates deep down to destroy the opponents’ faith and render his physical and mental faculties totally ineffective.”61 Malik’s thesis focuses on the fact that the primary reason for studying the Quran is to gain a greater understanding of these concepts and insights. The Prophet Mohammed, as the Quran attests, changed the intent and objective of war—raising the sphere of war to a Godly plane and purpose; the global proclamation and spread of Islam. This obviously rejects the Clausewitizian politics and policy dyad: that war is simply policy of the state.

Quranic warfare is “just war.” It is jus en bellum and jus ad bellum if fought “in the way of Allah” for divine purposes and the ends of Islam. This contradicts the western philosophy of just war theory. Another important connotation is that jihad is a continuum, across peace and war. It is a constant and covers the spectrum from grand strategy to tactical; collective to the individual; from the preparatory to the execution phases of war.

Malik highlights the fact that the preservation of life is not the ultimate end or greatest good in Quranic warfare. Ending “tumult and oppression,” achieving the war aims of Islam through jihad is the desired end. Dying in this cause brings direct reward in heaven for the mujahid, sacrifice is sacred. It naturally follows that death is not feared in Quranic warfare; indeed, “tranquility” invites God’s divine aid and assistance. The “Base” of the Quranic military strategy is spiritual preparation and “guarding ourselves against terror.”62 Readers may surmise that the training camps of al Qaeda (The Base) were designed as much for spiritual preparation as military. One needs only to recall the example of Mohammed Atta’s “last night” preparations.63

The battleground of Quranic war is the human soul—it is religious warfare. The object of war is to dislocate and destroy the [religious] “Faith” of the enemy. These principals are consistent with objectives of al Qaeda and other radical Islamic organizations. “Wars in the theory of Islam are . . . to advance God’s purposes on earth, and invariably they are defensive in character.”64 Peace treaties in theory are temporary, pragmatic protocols. This treatise acknowledges Islam’s manifest destiny and the approach to achieving it.

General Malik’s thesis in The Quranic Concept of War can be fundamentally described as “Islam is the answer.” He makes a case for war and the revitalization of Islam. This is a martial exegesis of the Quran. Malik like other modern Islamists are, at root, romantics. They focus on the Quran for jihad a doctrine that harkens back to the time of the Prophet and the classical-jihadist period when Islam enjoyed its most successful military campaigns and rapid growth.

The book’s metaphysical content borders on the supernatural and renders “assured expectations” that cannot be evaluated or tested in the arena of military experience. Incorporating “divine intervention” into military campaigns, while possibly advantageous, cannot be calculated as an overt force multiplier. Critics may also point to the ahistorical aspect of Malik’s thesis; that Islam is in a state of constant struggle with the non-Islamic world. There are examples of Muslim armies serving side by side with Christian armies in combat and campaigns are numerous, with Iraq being but a recent example.65

Malik’s appraisal of the Quran as a source of divine revelation for victory in war can likewise be criticized by historical example. Were it fully true and operationalized then the 1,400 years of Islamic military history might demonstrate something beyond its present state. War and peace in Islam has ebbed and flowed as has the conduct of war across all civilizations, ancient and modern. Islam as an independent military force has been in recession since 1492, although the latest jihadist’s threat of terror against the international system is, at least in part, a possible reaction to this long recession. Malik’s thesis essentially recognizes this historical pattern; indeed, Malik’s book may be an attempt to reverse this trend. The events of 9/11 may be seen as a validation of Malik’s thesis regarding the spiritual preparation and the use of terror. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were intended to seed “respect” (fear) in the minds of Islam’s enemies. These acts were not only directed at Western non-believers, but also the Muslim leaders who “profess the faith but are treacherous in their hearts” (allies and supporters of the United States). The barbarity of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and others in Iraq reflect a focus on extreme terror designed to wilt the will of Islam’s enemies.

Malik and Brohi both emphasize the defensive nature of jihad in Islam, but this position appears to be more a defense of a manifest destiny inevitably resulting in conflict. In their rendering of jihad both, not surprisingly, owe an intellectual debt to the Pakistani Islamist theorist, Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi. Al-Mawdudi is an important intellectual precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, and other modern Islamic revivalists. As al-Mawdudi notes, “Islamic jihad is both offensive and defensive” oriented on liberating man from humanistic tyranny.66

The author’s most controversial and, perhaps, most noteworthy assertion, is the distinction of “terror” as an ends rather than as a means to an end. The soul can only be touched by terror. Malik’s divine principal of war may be summarized in the dictum “strike terror; never feel terror.” Yet, he does not describe any specific method of delivering terror into the heart of Islam’s enemies. His view of terror seems to conflict with his earlier, limited, discussion of the concept of restraint in warfare and what actually constitutes “excesses” on the part of an enemy. It also conflicts with the character and nature of response that the author says is demanded. Malik leaves many of these pertinent issues undefined under a veneer of legitimating theory.

In spite of certain ambiguities and theoretical weaknesses, this work should be studied and valued for its insight and analysis relate to jihadists’ concepts and the asymmetric approach to war that radical Muslims may adapt and execute. With respect to global jihad terrorism, as the events of 9/11 so vividly demonstrated, there are those who believe and will exercise the tenets of The Quranic Concept of War.

NOTES

1. Brigadier S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Lahore, Pakistan: Associated Printers, 1979). Quranic War or Quranic Warfare refers to Malik’s treatment in his book.

2. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins Press, 1955), p. 64.

3. R. D. Hooker, “Beyond Vom Kriege: The Character and Conduct of Modern War,” Parameters, 35 (Summer 2005), 4.

4. Paul Sperry, “The Pentagon Breaks the Islam Taboo,” FrontPage Magazine, 14 December 2005, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20539.

5. Antulio Echevarria, Towards an American Way of War (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2004).

6. Patrick Poole, “The Muslim Brotherhood ‘Project,’” FrontPage Magazine, 11 May 2006, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22415.

7. Farhand Rajaee, Islamic Values and World View: Khomeyni on Man the State and International Politics,” (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), p 71.

8. Irfan Yusuf, “Theories on Islamic Books You Wouldn’t Read About,” Canberra Times, 21 July 2005, http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=your say&subclass=general&category=editorial  opinion&story_id=410105&y=2005&m=7.

9. Malik, pp. I-ii.

10. Ibid., p. 1.

11. Ibid., pp. I-ii.

12. See for example the discussion by Dr. Mary R. Habeck, “Jihadist Strategies in the War on Terrorism,” The Heritage Foundation, 8 November 2004, http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl855.cfm.

13. David Cook, Understanding Jihad, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005). There is approximately 1,400 years of jihad scholarship beginning with Mohammed and his military campaigns. Classical approaches to jihad as described by Mohammed’s successors, Abu Bakr for example, and the challenges presented by the struggles of succession to Mohammed.

14. Malik “Forward.”

15. Ibid., “Preface,” p. I.

16. Ibid., p. I. Note the Christian concept of the Trinity contained in the Nicene Creed is considered polytheistic according to Islam. The Trinity is not tawhid.

17. John Esposito, Islam, the Straight Path (3d ed.; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 12-14, 89.

18. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 72; Khadduri, pp. 65, 70-72; Cook, Understanding Jihad, pp. 35-39.

19. Brohi, “Preface,” p. ii.

20. Ibid., p. iii.

21. Ibid., p. iii.

22. Cook, pp. 95-96. Cook places these concepts of jihad doctrine in the lineage of contemporary and radical theory.

23. The indexed term for jihad is redirected to the term “Holy War” in this classic book of Islamic law or sharia by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, ed. and trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Beltsville, Md.: Amana Publication, 1997).

24. Malik, “Preface,” p. v.

25. Ibid., p. vii.

26. Cook, p. 107; Christoper Henzel, “The Origins of al Qaeda’s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy,” Parameters, 35 (Spring 2005), 69-80.

27. Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Concept of an Islamic State: An Analysis of the Ideological Controversy in Pakistan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

28. Malik, “Preface,” p. x. While in the Western tradition the state is viewed as a territorial and political body, based on “temporal elements such as shared memory, language, race, or the mere choice of its members.” Khomeini rejected this view, seeing the secular, political state and nationalism as Western constructs of imperialistic design to damage the cohesion of the ummah and impede the “advancement of Islam.” Rajaee, pp. 7, 67-71.

29. Ibid., p. x.

30. Khadduri, p. 63.

31. Malik, p. 6.

32. Ibid., p. 20.

33. Ibid., pp. 20-21. (Baqara: 190).

34. Malik, p. 11.

35. Ibid., p. 22. (Baqara: 217) and (Nissaa: 76).

36. Ibid., p. 23.

37. Ibid., p. 29.

38. Malik, p. 29. (Tauba: 7).

39. Ibid., p. 31.

40. Khadduri, p. 212. Jurists disagree on the allowable duration of treaties, the operative concept is that the dar al-Harb must be reduced to dar al-Islam over time.

41. Malik, p. 27.

42. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

43. Khadduri, p. 141.

44. Malik, p. 40

45. Ibid., pp. 37-38. (Baqara: 216).

46. Ibid., pp. 42-44. (Al-I-Imran: 169-70) and (Nissa: 95).

47. Ibid., pp. 42-44.

48. Cook, pp. 77, 124.

49. Malik, p. 49.

50. Ibid., p. 54.

51. Ibid., p. 57.

52. Malik, p. 57.

53. Ibid., p. 57.

54. Ibid., p. 58.

55. Ibid., p. 58.

56. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

57. Ibid., p. 60.

58. Ibid., p. 144.

59. Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1996), pp. 44-51, 128.

60. Malik, p. 3.

61. Ibid., p. 146.

62. Ibid., p.58.

63. “In Hijacker’s Bags, a Call to Planning, Prayer and Death,” Washington Post, 28 September 2001.

64. Malik, “Preface,” p. iii.

65. Four notable examples are the Crimean War where French, British and Ottoman Forces allied against the Russians; Fuad Pasha of the Ottoman Army served as a coalition partner with French Army during the 1860 Rebellion in Syria; more recently Muslim Arab and Kabyle soldiers served in the Harkis of the French Army in the French-Algerian War; and, of course, today in Iraq. Malik would address some of these events as alliances of convenience serving Islam’s interests in accord with the Quran and Sharia Law, others as takfir or treason.

66. Cook, pp. 99-103. Peters, p. 130.

The Reviewer: Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Myers is the Senior Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. A graduate of the US Military Academy he holds a Master of Arts from Tulane University. In 2004 he completed a Senior Army Fellowship at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. Previous assignments include Army Section Chief, US Military Group, Argentina. He also served as Chief of the South America Division and Senior Military Analyst for Colombia at the Defense Intelligence Agency.


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## archade (Oct 15, 2008)

With Friends Like These: Grievance, Governance, and Capacity-Building in COIN
ROBERT M. CHAMBERLAIN

From Parameters,

A consensus is emerging in the Army about the standard template for counterinsurgency: first clear an area of insurgent fighters; then implement population control measures to ensure the insurgents do not come back; and finally focus efforts on building governmental capacity so the population embraces the state and rejects the insurgents. This template makes a critical assumption about the government being restored—namely, that enhancing the power of the state will make the population less likely to support insurgents. This article questions that assumption by applying the doctrine outlined in Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, to the 1980-91 insurgency in El Salvador. While the Salvadoran insurgency ended 17 years ago, its lessons are a valuable guide for leaders attempting to make sense of the contradictions inherent in fighting the Long War.

El Salvador’s Insurgency

To understand the war in El Salvador, it is necessary to explore the structure of Salvadoran society. The interwoven structures of economic, political, and military power and their human consequences are critical to understanding the motivations of the insurgents of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the government response, and the overall progression of the war.

FM 3-24 identifies a wide variety of grievances that may be exploited by insurgents in their attempt to mobilize the population.1 At least three of these conditions—lack of popular participation, class exploitation and repression, and economic inequality—existed in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. The Salvadoran economy was built around agricultural exports, with land and wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Within this insular community, the largest 36 landlords controlled 66 percent of the capital of the 1,429 largest firms.2 At the other end of the spectrum, the percentage of rural workers who were temporary day laborers grew from 28 to 38 percent during the 1960s.3 These trends continued, and by 1980, three-quarters of campesinos (peasants) lived in poverty, and more than half were so poor that they couldn’t consistently afford food.4

The Salvadoran campesinos were kept in line by a robust state security apparatus and the historical precedent of the matanza (massacre). The matanza is indicative of class relationships in El Salvador; in January 1932, Communist peasants, primarily from indigenous communities, rose up and seized several small towns in the western part of the country, killing about 35 civilians and local police. Their rebellion was short-lived, as the Salvadoran Army crushed the movement in a mere three days. Over the next several weeks, the state killed between 8,000 and 25,000 individuals, roughly two percent of El Salvador’s population. The violence was especially concentrated in the rebellious communities, where up to two-thirds of the population died. This uprising and subsequent atrocity permanently marked Salvadoran politics with a violent anticommunism and suspicion of social reform as well as an expectation that the military could and should brutally suppress peasant insurrections.5

Completing the trifecta of grievances was the fact that, in the aftermath of the matanza, the Salvadoran military determined that as long as it was going to be responsible for protecting the country, it might as well run it too. Beginning with General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1932 and continuing until the early 1990s, the military was politically preeminent—either supplying the President directly or heavily influencing the legislative process through threatened and actual coups.6

These horrific conditions eventually led to public outcry, and the 1970s saw the formation of a wide variety of protest groups, both violent and nonviolent. Unfortunately for the nonviolent activists, the government responded to their concerns with “blatant fraud and violent repression.”7 As the protests increased, the government passed the “Law of the Defense and Guarantee of Public Order,” which gave security forces “arbitrary arrest and detention powers against demonstrators, labor activists, and others suspected of ‘subversive’ speech.” Actual insurgents were much more difficult to find than nonviolent protestors, however, so “[r]ather than focusing on the guerrilla organizations, the security forces arrested and in many cases contributed to the disappearance of an increasingly broad range of labor, student, neighborhood, church, and Christian Democratic activists.”8 A particularly flagrant incident took place in November 1980, when the leadership of the nonviolent leftist reform parties held a press conference. Once the reformers were gathered, they were kidnapped in front of the assembled reporters, not to be seen again until their dismembered bodies were found scattered around San Salvador.9 As a consequence, dissent was militarized and driven underground, and El Salvador’s guerrilla organizations united under the banner of the FMLN.10

As guerrilla activity increased, the security forces and associated right-wing death squads responded by murdering tens of thousands of people.11 Operating on a scale eerily reminiscent of the matanza, the security forces killed more than 40,000 people between 1978 and 1983, close to one percent of the population.12 This was a truly cataclysmic level of violence, magnified by the fact that these killings were concentrated within the country’s young male population.

American counterinsurgency doctrine predicts that arbitrary, widespread, and indiscriminate violence such as practiced in El Salvador is likely to backfire.

    Though firmness by security forces is often necessary to establish a secure government, a government that exceeds accepted local norms and abuses its people or is tyrannical generates resistance to its rule. People who have been maltreated or have had close friends or relatives killed by the government, particularly by the security forces, may strike back at their attackers. Security force abuses and the social upheaval caused by collateral damage from combat can be major escalating factors for insurgencies.13

As one would expect, such widespread brutality did little to quell the insurgency, and “*y the end of 1983, the FMLN’s military capacity was sufficient to control almost a fifth of the national territory . . . [insurgents] generally moved at will during the day as well as the night . . . [and] had eliminated fixed government positions.”14 Fearing the collapse of the Salvadoran government, the United States dramatically increased foreign aid and bolstered the Salvadoran military by providing advisers and supplying helicopters and attack aircraft.15

After the integration of aircraft into Salvadoran counterguerrilla operations the FMLN was forced to adapt. Since the Salvadoran Army could employ spotter aircraft to find large insurgent formations and then strike them with attack aircraft and newly created rapid-deployment battalions, the FMLN “broke its battalion-sized forces into smaller units and dispersed them throughout the countryside.”16 This was deeply demoralizing to the organization, which had anticipated a culminating victory in 1983, and the number of active insurgents dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 in 1984 to about half that by 1987.17 As the organization demonstrated its resilience, however, morale improved, and the FMLN gained enough strength that in 1989 it was able to launch a general campaign seizing neighborhoods in the capital and several other cities.18 This campaign was quickly suppressed, albeit with significant violence and collateral damage, demonstrating the government’s inability to stop the insurgency and the FMLN’s incapacity to put together a coalition broad enough to topple the government.

Soon thereafter, negotiations began to end El Salvador’s civil war. Begun under United Nations auspices in 1990, they culminated in a 1992 agreement wherein the government agreed to disband its internal security forces, reconstitute a police department that included former FMLN fighters, restrict the military to external defense, and strengthen the judicial and electoral systems.19 The FMLN agreed to disarm and demobilize its forces and enter the arena of electoral politics as an organized political party, as well as to set aside its demands for comprehensive land reform in favor of a more limited redistribution.20

Good Intentions and Death Squads

The United States contributed significantly to combating the insurgency in El Salvador, the reorientation of the counterinsurgency, and the eventual outcome of the war. It did so not merely through the contribution of money and equipment, but also through use of the counterinsurgency doctrine and expertise learned during Vietnam. Many of the principles employed in El Salvador remain in use today: enhance intelligence gathering capabilities, create local militias to work with security forces, build the capacity of host nation security forces, and develop a full-spectrum counterinsurgency plan. Yet the consistent application of these principles had wildly different outcomes at various times depending on the political context in which the aid was given; two examples are illustrative.

The National Democratic Republican Order, or ORDEN (the acronym itself means “order”), was founded in the 1960s under the auspices of President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. The program itself was designed to thwart emerging revolutionary trends in Latin America through a combination of development aid and security assistance. ORDEN fell in the latter category. American counterinsurgency specialists identified weaknesses in the Salvadoran intelligence system and began working with Salvadoran officers, most notably General Jose Alberto Medrano, on “the development of a countersubversion intelligence network, based on local informants and integrated at the national level.”21

Medrano first founded a small cadre of intelligence specialists that became known as the Salvadoran National Special Services Agency (ANSESAL), which in turn formed “the nationwide, grass-roots network of informants known as ORDEN.”22 Members of this group worked closely with local landowners and Salvadoran Army units to identify potential subversives, and were rewarded with preferential access to public agricultural, educational, and health programs. In principle this method is entirely in keeping with counterinsurgency best practices; it empowers the host nation, develops a robust human intelligence network, and rewards cooperation with the government.

In practice, however, ORDEN was something quite different. At the behest of economic elites and conservative elements within the Salvadoran military, ORDEN became progressively more public and militant, working first to violently disperse workers’ strikes before forming an integral component of the death squad infrastructure. In conjunction with elements under the leadership of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a founding member of ANSESAL, ORDEN provided the intelligence and occasionally the labor to identify campesinos who would be captured, tortured, and killed before their bodies were dumped in highly trafficked areas. In an effort to stop the ongoing atrocities, a junta of young officers that seized power in a 1979 coup outlawed the organization, but by then the damage was done. “Although ORDEN was formally abolished, its networks and militants remained in place, the legal ‘cover’ for repression was steadily expanded throughout 1980, and the military continued to control key state institutions.”23 Ironically, the increase in counterinsurgency capacity during the 1960s created a robust system of repression controlled by oligarchs and conservative military officers who repeatedly thwarted political reforms that might have prevented the insurgency in the first place.24

By contrast, US aid in the mid- to late 1980s was instrumental in limiting the activities of the death squads. It is not coincidental that the bulk of the extrajudicial killings occurred between 1979 and 1983, while the vast majority of American assistance was delivered from 1984 onward. In fact, US aid was conditioned on the cessation of death squad activity, and both then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey personally conveyed that message to the Salvadoran government.

In addition, the United States slowly convinced the Salvadoran security forces to plan a counterinsurgency based on restoring governmental legitimacy and not the violent repression inherent in the rural communities. This plan included the combat operations mentioned earlier, as well as a classic civil-military campaign providing health and education services to underserved villages and gradually opening the political system to broader participation. The United States underscored this effort with “programs ranging from support for centrist labor organizations allied with the PDC [the Christian Democratic Party, a civilian political organization], financial contribution to the PDC’s electoral campaigns, military training, and economic assistance designed to underwrite the country’s faltering economy.”25 Unlike the development of ORDEN, which enhanced the repressive power of the elite, American aid was contingent upon significant changes in El Salvador’s political and military affairs; thus “n the reluctant view of the military, the ongoing insurgency made US assistance necessary, and as a result, political liberalization as well.”26

Finally, the United States was instrumental in bringing the conflict to a close. When President Alfredo Cristiani, backed by a coalition of emerging financiers and industrialists who lacked ties to rural agricultural businesses, began negotiations with the FMLN in 1990, he threatened the interests of both the agro-elite and right-wing elements within the military. Historical precedent in El Salvador suggested that Cristiani would quickly find himself replaced by a more pliant politician, and, indeed, there were rumblings about a possible coup. The United States, Mexico, and Venezuela, however, all made clear that any new military regime would find its oil supply cut off, and thus would almost certainly collapse. The rumblings came to nothing, the war was brought to a close, and civilian authorities were able to dismantle the repressive security apparatus that had defined Salvadoran politics for the past 30 years.27

The differences between these two examples should give any counterinsurgent pause: How is it that the same theory of counterinsurgency could both contribute to the creation of a human catastrophe and its eventual resolution? The answer lies in a flaw in the doctrine itself.

The Paradox of Security and Governance in COIN

Counterinsurgency writing is riddled with Zen-like proverbs and paradoxes—in fact, FM 3-24 lists nine of them.28 Perhaps it is time to add a tenth: to achieve victory, you must be prepared to accept instability. To put it differently, to achieve the operational and strategic aims of a counterinsurgency, the counterinsurgent is obligated to accept the possibility that those aims are not attainable through support of the host nation government in its current form. The counterinsurgent should be willing to permit host nation political leaders to be significantly imperiled, or perhaps even to fail, in an effort to motivate them to make the changes required to quell the insurgency.

While this seems like an extremely controversial assertion, it is rooted in two observations inherent in FM 3-24. First, “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.”29 The manual goes on to clarify: “All governments rule through a combination of consent and coercion. Governments described as ‘legitimate’ rule primarily with the consent of the governed; those described as ‘illegitimate’ tend to rely mainly or entirely on coercion.”30 Second, “the behavior of HN [host nation] security force personnel is often a primary cause of public dissatisfaction . . . In more ideological struggles, discrimination may be against members of other political parties, whether in a minority cultural group or not; they may even be a cause of the insurgency.”31 Doctrinally, then, “a comprehensive security force development plan identifies and addresses biases as well as improper or corrupt practices.”32 These two points are critical, because they explain the mechanism that focuses the broad grievances previously listed onto the state: namely, inequitable social, economic, and political structures that are violently supported by a coercive state and a discriminatory security force capable of armed protest against the government itself.

This claim is broadly supported by the sociological literature on counterinsurgency; the countries most likely to face and succumb to an insurgency are regimes with elites that exploit their control over the state security forces to enforce unfair economic systems, enriching their friends while consigning most of the population to unending misery. These states create no room for peaceful protests, making insurgency the only viable form of dissent. This mode was the case in Cuba under Batista, Nicaragua under Somoza, Uganda under Obote, Rhodesia under Smith, and El Salvador under the military. The fundamental problems facing a counterinsurgent are governance and social structure; they are the lenses that both focus popular dissent and refract well-intentioned security assistance measures.

The truth of this concept is readily apparent in the El Salvador experience. The state was structured to preserve the privileges of a few at the expense of the many. The massive inequality, repression, and lack of representation were all intertwined; rich oligarchs provided patronage and economic support for the military and political leaders, who in turn used force to ensure an abundance of cheap, available, and quiescent labor. Any outside security assistance provided to that arrangement that was not tied to massive reforms only served to make the military better at repressing the citizenry. In effect, it would only add to the grievances against the government and security forces described earlier, which would in turn increase both the likelihood and potency of any potential insurgency. Moreover, by strengthening the security apparatus one reinforces the government’s ability to suppress nonviolent dissent, which again limits the possibility of internal government reforms.

This is exactly what occurred with ORDEN. The United States provided security assistance that was entirely appropriate in theory but was disastrous given the social context. In effect, the United States made a concerted effort to create an intelligence apparatus that was both responsive to the demands of local oligarchs and controlled by a central military authority. This organization was then used by those elites to stifle dissent, prevent reform, and neutralize political opponents. Moreover, once created, ORDEN took on a life of its own. Even after it was outlawed along with ANSESAL, key members of the Salvadoran military intelligence community continued to employ their death squad infrastructure in contravention of Salvadoran governmental and US policy, resulting in thousands of additional deaths and significant domestic and international opposition to the Salvadoran regime. This outcome was entirely predictable—the Salvadoran security forces, since the matanza in 1932, were built around the violent oppression of the campesinos. Any aid given without reform, especially aid designed to help ward off Communist insurrection, would conveniently be exercised for that purpose.

ORDEN was created in the 1960s, when the Communist threat in El Salvador was minimal. Yet 20 years later, when El Salvador faced a robust insurgency that was capable of operating in battalion-sized formations and moving with impunity through 20 percent of the countryside, American aid came with significant strings attached. Not only did world leaders demand a halt to extrajudicial killings, the United States also supported political organizations that directly threatened Salvadoran elite interests. Thus, in contrast to the Alliance for Progress aid that created ORDEN, a massive infusion of American money, equipment, and personnel in the 1980s resulted in a reduction in death squad activity and an increase in political opportunity. Eventually, the return to civilian rule, the marginalization of right-wing militarists, and the creation of a new economic elite led to a negotiated settlement ending the conflict. In short, linking political conditions with security assistance worked.

Unfortunately, this approach is the opposite of the doctrinal sequence of events outlined in FM 3-24. In the manual, security comes first, and it is only when “civil security is assured” that “focus expands to include governance, provision of essential services, and stimulation of economic development.”33 In the Logical Lines of Operation so neatly illustrated on pages 5-3 and 5-5, and enshrined in PowerPoint briefings across the Army, governance, economic development, civil security, host nation security forces, and essential services all run in parallel (and are all contained within the giant “Information Operations” arrow). History has demonstrated that this approach is problematic.

Effective and legitimate governance or governmental reforms should always be a precondition for any other sort of operation. It is the necessary condition that must be established in order for the counterinsurgency to succeed. When a commitment to legitimate governance is missing, any other assistance will be unproductive, because it will fail to address the underlying causes of the insurgency; actually, it will be counterproductive, due to its reinforcement and deepening of the grievances that originally led to the insurgency. All assistance to the host nation—whether in the form of elimination of its enemies, assistance to its population, or improvements to its security forces—is refracted through its state structure. A repressive, illegitimate state will use the resources of the US counterinsurgency program to perpetuate itself and expand its capabilities unless good governance is a precondition for additional aid. The good counterinsurgent should be prepared to refuse requests for support by an illegitimate government, even if this means risking the collapse of that government and the prospect of an extended struggle against an even more powerful opponent. The alternative is to contribute to the very problem the counterinsurgency is meant to solve, and thereby commit to an endless war of attrition. Governance comes first, and all else follows.

ORDEN Again?

While they are two very different conflicts, the lessons that El Salvador has to teach about the primacy of legitimate governance are critical to analyzing the counterinsurgency in Iraq. The public discussion regarding Iraq up until now has been predicated on the idea that improvements in security will provide the space for political reconciliation to go forward. It is worth considering, however, the possibility that the opposite is true, that security gains without political reconciliation are at best transient and at worst inimical to political settlement. The short and unhappy history of the Iraqi National Police illustrates this point.

The National Police was created in April 2006 under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The abstract organizational rationale for doing so was quite reasonable; there had been an identified need for the Iraqi police to have a heavy paramilitary capability in order to effectively combat well-armed insurgents. Up until 2006, that capability was provided by a hodgepodge of organizations founded by both the Coalition and the government of Iraq. From a bureaucratic perspective, combining these units under a unified command would yield salutary benefits in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Much like with ANSESAL and ORDEN, however, the question was never asked “effective according to whom?” During the formation of the organizations that were to become the National Police, the emphasis was on rapidly restoring security and building Iraqi capacity, rather than ensuring proportional representation.

    “When we stood them up, we didn’t ask, ‘Are you Sunni or are you Shia?’” Major General Joseph F. Peterson, in charge of police training, said in an interview at a base in Taji, north of Baghdad, as he was visiting soldiers newly assigned to the Iraqi police. “They ended up being 99 percent Shia. Now, when we look at that, we say, ‘They do not reflect the population of Iraq.’”34

Coalition planners assumed that the Iraqi security forces would be a public institution that acted in the best interests of the entire population. The commanders of the National Police had other plans. The Ministry of the Interior was initially controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia group that, as its name suggests, wishes to remold Iraq into a Shia republic along the Iranian model. Having experienced severe repression at the hands of the state security forces in the Saddam era, they viewed control of the police forces as an absolute necessity. The Iraqi police, and especially the Iraqi National Police, became a force created with Coalition resources and yet subverted to advance a violent sectarian agenda.

The result was predictable. Just as good intentions in El Salvador fueled the creation of ORDEN and the murder of thousands of campesinos, good intentions in Iraq created the National Police and resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. National Police units facilitated the operation of Shia death squads in neighborhoods they were responsible for, ran their own network of secret prisons and torture chambers, and were implicated in repeated massacres of Sunni civilians. The situation became so bad that an entire Iraqi police commando brigade was taken off line for retraining, nine brigade and 17 battalion commanders were replaced, and the Coalition pressured Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki into naming a new, reformist Minister of the Interior.35

Unfortunately, the damage caused by the rush to achieve security through the creation of the National Police may be irreversible. Much like the structures of ORDEN that survived the formal dissolution of the organization in 1980, the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police have proven resistant to reform. Despite Coalition efforts, the force is still overwhelmingly Shia, and the government has ignored a recently created police training center in Anbar Province, according to its commander.36 Additionally, the National Police are widely reviled and have been so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the population that General James Jones’s commission on Iraqi Security Forces recommended it be entirely disbanded.37

The National Police, like ORDEN, was a spectacular failure because, rather than make security assistance contingent upon necessary political reforms and a nonsectarian ideology, it rapidly developed a coercive capability in the hopes that a space for political progress could be created. This challenge holds important lessons for the future of Iraq, as well as American security policy generally. Much ado has been made about the rapid reduction of violence in Iraq since the creation of the Sons of Iraq (SOI), also known as Concerned Local Citizens or Awakening groups, throughout the country. Research indicates that those security gains may be largely illusory.

While SOI groups are eventually to be integrated into the Iraqi Security Forces, there has been a consistent refusal on the part of the Ministry of the Interior to allow widespread recruitment of SOI members in Sunni areas. Moreover, rifts and violent clashes with the central government have already occurred in Diyala, where SOI groups ominously walked off the job with weapons in-hand in response to a police killing that involved a local family. All of this disruption occurs in a larger political context in which the largest Sunni parties continue to boycott Parliament in protest of what they perceive to be sectarian policies implemented at the expense of their communities. It is entirely possible that the SOI program will simply result in the armament and organization of Sunni tribal militias throughout the country, who, while happy to eject al Qaeda, will be less sanguine about the imposition of central government authority in their communities. Thus, the security gains occurring now contain within them the seeds of their own demise.

Conclusion

While the American military has made great strides in the tactical and operational aspects of counterinsurgency, it still faces challenges in the realm of strategy. National objectives are articulated in a political vocabulary; the desired outcome in El Salvador and in Iraq was a stable, secure, US-friendly, democratic regime. The reflexive response to instability, insecurity, or nondemocratic hostility is a rush to augment internal security forces. Ostensibly once the security situation is assured, necessary political reforms can proceed. Unfortunately, it would appear that this is seldom the case; the attempt to provide security strengthens elements within the state that have the capability to contribute to future instability. Further, by reinforcing violent, repressive organizations in the name of expediency, political positions harden and the underlying problems only become more intractable.

There is a better way. While it seems counterintuitive, instability can be essential to a counterinsurgency because it forces a change in the status quo. A politician threatened with his imminent demise is much more likely to undertake the deep structural reforms necessary to address the underlying dynamics of the conflict. Conditional security aid can be extremely helpful in this regard. The Leahy Amendment, which forbids US funding of organizations implicated in human rights abuses, and high-level pressure, such as George Bush’s vice presidential visit to El Salvador, have historically had a significant effect. But conditionality is key.

A successful counterinsurgency campaign has to carry within it a credible threat of withdrawal. Rather than a security plan that will be implemented regardless of political change, security aid should be tied to political benchmarks. Consistent failure to achieve those benchmarks can result in the continual drawdown and eventual elimination of US support. In one sense this is brinksmanship—the host nation government’s fear of revolution versus the US government’s discomfort with instability. But in another, it’s just common sense; without political reform, American forces will be mired in and contributing to the perpetuation of an unending conflict. Feckless, self-interested, sectarian politicians do not deserve the sacrifices in blood and treasure required to prop up their regimes.

NOTES

1. Department of the Army, Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington: Headquarters Department of the Army, 2006), para. 1-50.

2. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 39.

3. Ibid., 35.

4. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 24.

5. Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), 120.

6. See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2d ed.; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993).

7. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 154.

8. William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1996), 114.

9. Cynthia J. Arnson, “Window on the Past: A Declassified History of Death Squads in El Salvador” in Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, eds., Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (New York: Palgrave Macmillin, 2000), 85.

10. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 24.

11. “Murdered” was the word used by then-Ambassador Thomas Pickering to describe the Salvadoran government’s actions.

12. Stanley, 3.

13. FM 3-24, para. 1-45.

14. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 131.

15. Ibid., 134.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 135.

18. Ibid., 29.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Stanley, 81.

22. Ibid.

23. Wood, Forging Democracy from Below, 46.

24. Stanley, 83.

25. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 48.

26. Ibid.

27. Stanley, 8.

28. FM 3-24, paras. 1-149 through 1-158.

29. Ibid., para. 1-113.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., para. 6-10.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., para. 5-5.

34. Edward Wong, “U.S. is Seeking Better Balance in Iraqi Police,” The New York Times, 7 March 2006.

35. David Cloud, “Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police,” The New York Times, 31 August 2007.

36. See Michael Gordon, “Iraq Hampers US Bid to Widen Sunni Police Role,” The New York Times, 28 October 2007.

37. James Jones, The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, 6 September 2007.

Captain Robert M. Chamberlain is a Truman and Rhodes Scholar who specializes in theories of violence, substate actors, and collective identity. He was a battalion military transition team senior maneuver adviser in Iraq and is conducting background research on theories and histories of revolutionary movements.*


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## archade (Oct 15, 2008)

Urban Guerrilla Warfare. By Anthony James Joes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. 232 pages.

Reviewed by Frank L. Jones, Professor of Security Studies, US Army War College.

“The worst policy is to attack cities,” admonished the ancient Chinese theorist of war, Sun Tzu, “attack cities only when there is no alternative.” Urban warfare in all its varieties is as brutish and nasty as any other terrain in which to fight. As Anthony Joes, author of several books on insurgency, points out, urban guerrilla warfare can be especially pernicious. The urban guerrilla does not wear a uniform, but blends in with the city’s population to attain secrecy and anonymity; he matches his tactics to the topography of brick and mortar: every doorway becomes a firing point and every sewer a line of communication. For the government’s security forces to win, they must adapt more rapidly than the guerrilla and overcome conventional thinking and bureaucratic repertoires. Accurate intelligence becomes the coin of the realm, and as Joes points out, soldiers sometimes willingly cast aside their scruples and risk dishonor to obtain it. His instructive book tells the story of these fighters, their obsessions and passions, and much more.

Joes examines seven case studies of urban guerrilla warfare beginning with the battle between Polish partisans, German soldiers, and the SS during the Warsaw Uprising, in the declining days of the short-lived 1,000-year Reich. It ends with the Russian and Chechen guerrillas’ battle over Grozny, a city that the Russians besieged with infantry, artillery, tanks, and reported indiscriminate killing. As the author accurately describes, by the end of the fighting, the city’s inhabitants knew all four horsemen of the Apocalypse intimately.

A virtue of this book is that Joes introduces each case with explanatory information so the reader can appreciate the parties and triggering events. This approach is particularly helpful for lesser-known guerrilla actions of South American cities, as well as Northern Ireland where “The Troubles” lasted nearly three decades. All of the chapters are quite interesting and informative, but two are noteworthy.

Forty years ago, on 30 January 1968, the Vietnamese ushered in their New Year, Tet, during a holiday ceasefire agreed to by the warring parties, the South Vietnamese and their US allies, and the Communist regime in North Vietnam. A few hours after midnight, the Communist regime broke the pledge, directing its Viet Cong guerrillas in the south to attack the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as well as 38 of the 44 province capitals. In this chapter, Joes has produced what is arguably the best succinct scholarly treatment of that offensive. He covers all the major points—the events leading to the attack, the failure of intelligence on both sides, and the fighting. Joes describes how the US press reacted to the event, which then ran like an electric current through the American body politic. Although the United States and South Vietnam’s counterattack in Saigon and elsewhere mauled the Viet Cong, it was a psychological victory for the Communists.

The other striking chapter concerns the Battle of Algiers. Joes uses the standard sources such as Alistair Horne, but has added to the discourse, incorporating such recent publications as the memoirs of General Paul Aussaresses, head of French intelligence efforts against the terrorists, and several other scholarly articles. This well-crafted chapter covers important issues such as the politico-military environment in which the French army found itself at home and abroad, the insurgents’ turn to urban terror tactics, the use of torture by the French, and the sad fate of the Algerian Muslims who remained loyal to France.

Ultimately, this book is a story of failures—operational and theoretical. Joes captures the latter deftly in his discussion of Carlos Marighella, a 1960s leftist intellectual smitten by Castro’s revolutionary success. As Joes demonstrates, Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla proved to be an impractical gospel for disciples and himself—Brazilian security forces shot him in the streets of Sao Paulo.

Some may criticize Joes’s analysis as too laden with Communist examples, referring to his discussion of Mao in the introduction. But just as it is unthinkable for artists not to study the old masters, it is no less true for those who seek to study the strategic art. Mao’s theory is crucial to a basic understanding of guerrilla warfare. The value of Joes’s book is his evenhanded selection of cases, from which students of insurgency and conventional warfare will benefit, as well as professors searching for a text to enrich their students’ understanding.


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## archade (Oct 21, 2008)

David J. Silbey. A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902. New York: Hill & Wang, 2007. 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-7187-6; (paper), ISBN 978-0-8090-9661-9.

Reviewed by Edgar F. Raines Jr.
Published on H-War (August, 2008)

Scholar in the Sun

A War of Frontier and Empire is a short (219 pages of text) overview of the Philippine-American War. The author, David J. Silbey, a young historian at Alvernia College in Reading, Pennsylvania, argues that the conflict represented a culminating point for one of nineteenth-century America's dominant social movements--manifest destiny. By 1898 the North American continent appeared too confining for American ambitions. The creation of an overseas empire was one of the major consequences of the war with Spain, but at least some contemporaries saw other more appealing choices about how the United States might interact with the world in the dawning twentieth century. In the author's words, these conflicting currents of opinion made the United States's destiny in 1898 "less manifest and more ambiguous" (p. xiii). In slightly more than three years the conflict in the Philippines--particularly the last two years of guerrilla warfare--put paid to any hopes in American imperialist circles for further territorial expansion by shrinking popular support for such a policy. Somehow, this point eludes the author, despite the fact that he lays the groundwork for such an argument in his opening chapter.

The war became the defining national event for Filipinos, but only long after the fact. At the time, the Filipino war effort consisted of a shifting coalition of regions and groups. Although some Filipino historians have tried to read a collective national consciousness into the behavior of the revolutionaries (insurgents to the Spanish and the Americans), Silbey argues that most of them had no sense of a larger nation. Hailing for the most part from isolated villages, most of the Filipino soldiers gathered outside Manila had never before been more than twenty-five miles from home. Their primary allegiances were local and ethnic rather than national. Silbey extends this argument to explain the behavior of the Filipino army in combat. The glue that held that force together was the social ties that the soldiers brought with them from home into a military environment. The officer class was drawn from local notables while the soldiers came from the peasantry. Acts of good soldiership thus became ways that young men raised in a profoundly class-conscious and deferential society could demonstrate their loyalty to their patrons. Silbey goes even further to argue that the poor showing of the Filipinos in the first major engagement of the war, the battle of Manila (February 4-5, 1899), was due to the absence of officers, who were attending fiestas. Without their patrons available to see their behavior under fire, the peasant soldiers were inclined to decamp at critical moments in the fighting.

Silbey's linking of social structure, national consciousness (or lack thereof), and military performance is a stunning insight, one that opens up interesting lines for future research. Granted that the Filipinos came out of very isolated local backgrounds; yet we know that the experience of military service in the American Revolution, particularly in the Continental Army, was a profoundly nationalizing event for people from similarly isolated backgrounds.[1] Might something similar be occurring among the Filipinos? If so, might there be more than a germ of truth in the general thrust (if not all the particulars) of the arguments of the Filipino national historians whose work Silbey so easily dismisses? A survey of the type that Silbey has written cannot answer these questions, only raise them. That, Silbey has done in a very provocative fashion. On this issue, Silbey is probably more right than wrong, but a more definitive conclusion will require more work--if, that is, the surviving sources will permit the kind of detailed examination needed.

Admirable as Silbey's exposition of Filipino social structure is, he over relies on this analysis in explaining the Filipino army's battlefield performance. Community based military units have shown great esprit de corps and resilience in other wars (witness the volunteer regiments of the American Civil War), but those organizations drew upon existing military organization, tradition, and doctrine. At the sharp end, the hard military realities determine outcomes--decent equipment, adequate supply, proficiency at arms, realistic doctrine, hard training, and experienced noncommissioned and junior commissioned officers determine whether troops can hold their position or maneuver under fire. These were the attributes that the Filipino Army lacked and whose absence put it at a severe disadvantage when faced by a force that possessed such characteristics. Silbey is quite right to point out that many Filipino officers were absent from their units attending fiestas when fighting first broke out on the evening of February 4, 1899, but there is nothing to suggest that they were absent during the fighting on February 5, when the decisive American attack occurred--which rather undermines the author's argument.

Silbey, whose previous work has been in English social history, is obviously a quick study--perhaps too quick. His research is grounded in published primary and secondary sources; although, he has made good use also of the Spanish-American War veterans' survey in manuscript conducted by the U.S. Army Military History Institute in the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, however, he overlooks several valuable works, including Edith Moses's charming Unofficial Letters of an Officer's Wife (1908); James A. Le Roy's scholarly but incomplete The Americans in the Philippines: A History of the Conquest and First Years of Occupation, with an Introductory Account of the Spanish Rule (2 vols., 1914); James H. Blount's polemic, that includes snippets of memoir and a fair-minded discussion of some of his opponents, The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912 (1912); Heath Twichell's study of the founder of the Philippine Constabulary, Allen: The Biography of an Army Officer, 1859-1930(1974); and Ralph Minger's William Howard Taft and United States Foreign Policy: The Apprenticeship Years, 1900-1908 (1975), among others. This weakness extends into his discussion of one of his main protagonists, the U.S. Army. He depends heavily on Edward M. Coffman's The Old Army (1986), a wonderful social history of the peacetime Army, but not sufficient for Silbey's purposes, which is to indicate the combat readiness of the Army on the eve of conflict. His fascination with social structure leads him to ignore doctrine and training. He would have done well to consult recent works by Perry Jamieson and Andrew Birtle. Silbey does use Russell Gilmore's important 1974 article on marksmanship training, but only to provide the technical specifications of the Krag-Jorgensen Rifle. Had he also examined Gilmore's dissertation of the same year, he might have better discerned the thrust of Gilmore's argument and recognized its importance for his purposes.[2]

Although the title and introduction emphasize themes from U.S. history, the internal logic is determined largely by the Filipino perspective. Thus, Silbey's argument that Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo was justifiably concerned that reverting to guerrilla warfare would lead to a loss of control of the revolution--which he equated with a loss of sovereignty--leads the author to focus on the conventional phase of the war, with only a passing nod to the over two years of guerrilla war that followed. This is a brilliant insight into Aguinaldo's thinking, but whether the author should use it to structure his book is another question. One way to think about the Philippine-American War (or the Philippine Insurrection) is to look on it as a struggle for sovereignty. Before the outbreak of the fighting, the Americans under the international legal conventions of the time enjoyed de jure sovereignty over the entire archipelago but de facto sovereignty only over Manila, while the revolutionaries enjoyed de facto sovereignty over everything except Manila. The war determined who would exercise both over all. To win, the Filipinos had only not to lose, while the Americans actually had to achieve total victory. Given the disparities between the American and Filipino forces, there was no way that the Filipinos could reasonably anticipate not losing in conventional operations. So, for the U.S. high command, victory in the conventional phase was only the first and easiest stage. American forces had to prevail in counterinsurgency before achieving success. The great contribution of military historians of the past forty years has been to focus attention on this part of the war. By ignoring the importance of this phase, Silbey returns the historiography to the point it achieved with the publication of William T. Sexton's Soldiers in the Sun in 1939.

At the same time A War of Frontier and Empire enjoys the virtues of its defects. If the author puts too much emphasis on Filipino social structure, his description of that social structure and his linking of it to military organizations is very deft. Focusing on whole societies naturally leads him to examine domestic politics, policy formation, diplomacy, and their nexus with national strategy--and he does this very well for both the Filipinos and the Americans. If he overemphasizes the conventional phase, he has a very clear exposition of the competing campaign strategies of the two sides, including a good discussion of the logistics problem the Americans faced. In the process he continues the rehabilitation of Major General Elwell S. Otis's reputation as an insightful strategist with a hard-headed view of logistical realities. At the same time, Silbey integrates and encapsulates the historiography of a number of topics into the text. Over and above all this, he writes well. He combines clarity of exposition with graceful prose.

A War of Frontier and Empire will not replace Brian Linn's The Philippine War(2000) as the standard account of the conflict. Because it is both simpler and shorter than Linn's study, Frontier is a good undergraduate text, provided one keeps the reservations expressed above in mind. At the same time, because the author engages many of the most important historiographic disputes and, because as a Europeanist he brings a fresh perspective to these disagreements, senior scholars will find much to ponder. Finally, as this review suggests, the volume encourages readers to consider carefully the most basic issues involved in the Philippine-American War. This is, perhaps, the ultimate accolade for any book.

Notes

[1]. See Robert K. Wright Jr. and Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution (Washington, D.C: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1992).

[2]. Perry D. Jamieson, Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1998); and Russell S. Gilmore, "'The New Courage': Rifles and Soldier Individualism, 1876-1918," Military Affairs 40 (October 1976): 97-102; and "The Crack Shots and Patriots: The National Rifle Association and America's Military Sporting Tradition, 1871 1929" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974).


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## archade (Oct 21, 2008)

Luc Capdevila, Daniel Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9, ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by Mark R. Hatlie
Published on H-War (July, 2008)

War and Memorial Culture

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn.

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable.

Chapters cover the struggle by individuals, families, armies, and states to cope with--that is, count, identify, and properly mourn--the unprecedented numbers of dead soldiers and, eventually, civilians as well. Expectations and cultural norms could hardly be reconciled with the extraordinary situation and the opening chapters systematically discuss the various tensions. After a chapter on enemy bodies, there are two final chapters on memory, rituals, and commemorations. Much of this material, especially the last two chapters, will be familiar to many scholars. As a general overview of the research in the field it covers not only the structural and institutional aspects of mass death in war, but trends such as the role played by war in the evolving sensibilities with regard to death, changes in the use of images of the dead, and changing cultural practices both on and off the battlefield.

The examples of public memorial culture from the Vichy and occupation period of 1941-44 represent one of the strengths of the book. They appear throughout, but especially in the final section, on ritualized mourning. Because of the particular circumstances, these examples show quite effectively the political dimension of public mourning in wartime.

A primary weakness of the work stems from some lack of familiarity with the American Civil War of 1861-65. If their work had been informed by the more recent work of Drew Gilpin Faust (This Republic of Suffering, 2008), for example, the authors would have begun their discussion of national cemeteries for war dead at Antietam and Gettysburg instead of starting later, in Europe. More trivially, Andersonville is a "great battle" instead of an infamous prisoner of war camp (p. 157). Also, the role of images of death, primarily photographs, gets a nod in War Dead. Students of the Civil War, citing the work of Mathew Brady and others, would presumably put more emphasis on the American experience in the history of wartime images of death. One can also make the case that the shock of mass death in the American Civil War--a proportion of the population equivalent to several million deaths in today's United States--marks a contrast to past experience just as stark as World War I did for Europe, the focus of this book and other recent literature.

Indeed, Faust's study of death and dying in the American Civil War makes a good contrast with War Dead for highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. By focusing on one place and time, Faust can delve much more deeply into the culture, tracing such developments as American notions of domesticity and the "good death," the tension between religious and secular interpretations of death, dying and the conflict in general, and the roles of race and gender. She can also more closely test the relationship between democracy and the paternal treatment of fallen citizens in wartime. There is even a chapter on killing (although not as in depth and psychological as David Grossman's On Killing, 1995). Faust can offer vivid examples of such themes as the efforts of families to recover bodies and record in detail the practices and circumstances of their recovery efforts.

Capdevila and Voldman are more ambitious, covering much more ground in far fewer pages. The result is that larger patterns and contexts emerge, but the examples jump rapidly from place to place and time to time, often leaving the reader curious about the potential depth of the claim. Some themes are explored in more depth over a paragraph or several pages: the commemorative efforts of French Jews following World War I, for example, or the tombs of the Unknown Soldier in Europe and the Americas.

Both studies have chapters on the treatment of enemy bodies. Faust goes into great detail and explores the concrete circumstances and policies involved on both sides--for example, federal efforts to count, name and bury Union soldiers while intentionally leaving the rebels to rot in the open air. Capdevila and Voldman start by putting the subject into the context of developing international norms and laws, offering useful and highly relevant background material. They then proceed by themes centered on the practices and motives of the living with regard to dead bodies, showing practices ranging from respectful to horrific treatment. Some examples, however, are not drawn from wartime, but from the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. Their practice of "disappearing" political enemies makes a good example for their case of how bodies can be used as a political weapon, but it is not a very convincing comparison to the mass disappearance of bodies in the artillery barrages of 1914-18 or swallowed up in improvised battlefield mass graves from Cold Harbor to Stalingrad. Both the scale and the circumstance differ appreciably and, hence, comparing the motives and practices becomes questionable. The coverage of the Chilean and Argentinean cases is all the more out of place because the reviewer was anticipating the Latin American cases to include more examples from, say, the Chaco War of the 1930s. But, it is mentioned only briefly in earlier contexts. The inclusion of the Holocaust in the section on enemy bodies is more convincing, although also is not about "combat" deaths.

Each chapter has end notes, and the book has a thematic bibliography. Most of the literature cited is in French, so the book gives the non-French reader an introduction to the state of the field in that country. The translation is easy to read quickly, despite a handful of awkward passages that may also be in the original. The book would make a good general survey for undergraduate use in classes on war and society, or Western cultural history.


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## archade (Oct 21, 2008)

Timothy J. Henderson. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill & Wang, 2007. xxii + 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-6120-4.

Reviewed by Gregory S. Hospodor
Published on H-War (June, 2008)

Choosing Glorious Defeat

Historians confront a difficult question when they address the causes of the Mexican American War of 1846-48. That an expansionist impulse, most often referred to as Manifest Destiny, brought the United States into conflict with Mexico is a given, but what about Mexico? By any objective measure, Mexico stood little chance to triumph in a war with the United States--the economy of the United States was at least thirteen times larger; its population three times greater; its regular army, though smaller, was well trained and armed with modern weapons; its internal political scene appeared tranquil in comparison to Mexico's; and the list goes on. Yet, why did Mexico choose to fight a war it would almost certainly lose?

Few historians have bothered to delve deeply into the Mexican side of the story. Historians from north of the Rio Grande have focused most often on the intricacies of American diplomacy and military operations. When they did consider causation from the Mexican point of view, they often got it wrong. An older generation, led most notably by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Harvey Smith, assessed Mexican hubris as a primary cause of the war. Thus interpreted, Mexico welcomed a conflict that it naively thought it could win. In watered down form, echoes of this interpretation persist even today. In Mexico, the conflict has often been too painful an event to warrant close scrutiny. Yankee expansionism was the cause, which allowed Mexican scholars to focus on what appeared to be more pressing questions, those that revolved around and found resolution in the Mexican Revolution. Fortunately, the situation has begun to change during the last fifteen years or so. For example, Irving Levinson (2005) and Pedro Santoni (1996) have published important books that provide a more nuanced consideration of the Mexican side of the war. Timothy J. Henderson's A Glorious Defeat is a welcome addition to this trend.

Henderson's book is a synthetic introduction to the topic, which accounts for both its strengths and weaknesses. Look elsewhere for detailed mining and analysis of primary sources. Notes are few and confined to quotations from published sources, which will make it difficult for anyone who is not a Mexican specialist to follow where the author rests in current historiographical debates. Henderson does, however, provide a useful and comprehensive list of suggestions for further reading. Look elsewhere, too, for detailed coverage of the military aspects of the war. At times, the reader is also left wishing for more; clearly, depth was sacrificed in the interest of brevity. These quibbles, of course, come with the territory and do not detract materially from the book's value. The synthetic format's strength rests in its breadth of coverage chronologically and topically, and Henderson's chapters march relentlessly from independence in 1821 toward the denouement of the war itself. Those who teach the history of Mexico know that the tumultuous period between independence and La Reforma is especially tough on undergraduates. Henderson's treatment of the period is both approachable and sophisticated at the same time. I have yet to run across a better introduction to this period of Mexican history for the undergraduate or general reader. This said, the specialist will find little new here.

Henderson argues that chaotic domestic political conditions between 1821 and 1846 created a situation where the only option open to Mexico's leaders was war with the United States, a war that many recognized their country would lose. Endemic conflict, even civil war, between various groups of liberal federalists and conservative centralists undermined the rule of law; inhibited both economic development and the creation of a sense of national unity; and created opportunities for ambitious, unscrupulous, powerful risk takers to come to the fore, most notably Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Many of Mexico's politicos agreed on only one thing--that the lower classes, which constituted the vast bulk of the population, had to be suppressed. Indeed, the real fear of insurrection led to a situation that resembled men fighting over possession of a lifeboat: all need take care that their actions did not sink their very means of survival. Hobbled by domestic turmoil, Mexico confronted its northern neighbor's expansionism. The problem of holding on to the borderlands proved a Gordian knot. Good ideas and intentions abounded, but energy and focus were lacking. With Texas's de facto independence won in 1836, the related issues of bringing the breakaway province to heel and standing up to the United States became hobby horses in the internecine political struggle among factions in Mexico proper; the issues were used to attack a political opponent's courage and manhood. In this environment, calm realism was declaimed as cowardice, and the situation only worsened with the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845. Moderate federalists, such as President Jose Joaquin de Herrera, recognized that Mexico was unprepared for war, but proved helpless to stop the rush toward it. Instead, "the desperate glory of death on the battlefield seemed preferable to the ignominy of compromise and surrender" (p. 191). The same divisions that brought Mexico to war contributed to its defeat and the disastrous consequences it entailed.

As well as providing a cogent introduction to the topic, Henderson's book serves as a pointed reminder of the powerful and baneful effect of bellicose political discourse. Drawing historical parallels is always dangerous, but the exercise, however inadequate, can prove illuminating. Like Henderson's Mexico, the American South in the 1840s and 1850s saw the creation of a political hobby horse, the defense of slavery, which squelched reasonable voices and eventually led to secession, war, and defeat. Similarly, the issue of Alsace-Lorraine contributed to France's welcoming of war in 1914. And, Cato the Elder's constant refrain that Carthage must be destroyed helped shape Rome's policy during the Punic Wars.


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## archade (Nov 2, 2008)

By Lieutenant Colonel (ret) Thomas P. Odom, of

Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism
By James D. Kiras
Published by Routledge

In Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism, James D. Kiras offers a strategic framework for analyzing the use of special operations forces (SOF) and special operations (SO) to achieve strategic effects as part of a larger conventional war. In doing so, Kiras defines both SOF and SO in a limited sense, excluding elite but more conventional forces by requiring a selection process to decide what makes SOF and SO "special". His strategic framework for analysis is bipolar. On one extreme Kiras offers "annihilation" strategy and reviews it in its many forms. On the other he expounds attrition-based strategy, expanding it to the point where it becomes a near catch-all of strategic thought.

Understanding the differences between annihilation and attrition is central to this monograph. Simply put annihilation theory posits that an enemy can be forced to surrender if struck in a certain way that paralyzes his ability to make war. Think of it as the "silver bullet" or "brass ring" approach to strategy, one that has great attraction to military and political leaders alike. Shoot that silver bullet into an opponent or pull a particular brass ring controlling his war making capacity and his will to fight on will evaporate along with his capacity. Attrition, on the other hand, is not so elegant for attrition means that one accepts war as a contest of morals and materiel, inextricably woven together, that requires time, will power, and blood to achieve victory. Annihilation strategy is therefore seductively attractive, especially when tied to technological advances such as the tank or airpower or the use of SOF against particular vulnerabilities.

Kiras contends that SOF are best used to complement a measured strategy of attrition. He largely dismisses annihilation strategy's quest for strategic paralysis of the enemy as a paralysis of thought. His critical question is what does using SOF in a particular SO achieve in the larger context of an attrition-based war? Kiras uses two case studies to illustrate what he means in asking that critical question. The first is the British effort to collapse the German war-making capacity by "busting" the Ruhr Valley dams. Kiras classifies the dambusting effort by 617 Squadron as a great but costly raid that fell far short of its intended goal to bring the German war machine to a grinding halt. His second case study is the helter-skelter tactical employment of the Special Air Service (SAS) brigade in conjunction with the invasion and liberation of France. Kiras contends that while a coordinated SAS campaign could have greatly assisted and perhaps accelerated the liberation of France, convoluted command and control, personalities, and poor planning meant the SAS paid a heavy price in lives to achieve little in the greater scheme of things. Both case studies are therefore offered as examples of how not to use SOF or mount SO.

I would say Kiras' monograph has great strengths and a few weaknesses. First of all, for the reader looking for a quick review of strategic thought, this book is a real find. Annihilation theory comes across as a bumper-sticker approach to strategic thought. I found his discussion of John Warden's 5-ring model useful, fair, and ultimately damning when judged against the reality of war. Second Kiras offers a broader explanation of attrition-based strategy than one typically hears, especially today when bumper stickers are quite popular. Placing SOF and SO in the context of annihilation and attrition strategies was clearly Kiras' main goal and he did so quite effectively.

As for weaknesses, I would offer but a couple of comments. First of all I would say the book is British-centric in its case studies and in some ways its analysis. Operation Chastise and 617 Squadron were purely British efforts. The SAS brigade's effort in France went through British chains of command until it reached Eisenhower. Secondly and perhaps this is an extension of the first weakness, Kiras is more convincing when he discusses airpower-related subjects than he is on SAS operations. He rightfully criticizes the inflated claims concerning the dambusting effort. Then he makes what I would call inflated hypothetical claims of what might have happened in France had the SAS been properly used. I believe he would have been better served by letting a reader make such leaps alone.

Overall I believe this monograph has great value to policy makers and soldiers, conventional and unconventional. As the author rightly points out, policy makers and SOF warriors have often struggled with the issue of best use. Both have, on occasion, gotten it wrong. James D. Kiras rightly cautions that such use must be governed by a rule of sustained value added to the overall effort of an attrition-based strategy. That certainly is nothing new to students of conventional warfare. Kiras is, in my opinion, warning that SOF and SO must be used in a coherent, comprehensive, and strategic version of combined arms warfare. He is correct and that is what makes his book valuable.

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Colonel Odom retired in 1996. He was a Foreign Area Officer on the Middle East-North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for 15 years. His last 30 months on active duty were as US Defense Attaché in Zaire and then Rwanda. A historian, Colonel Odom authored Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda, Texas A&M University Press, 2005; Shaba II: the French and Belgian Military Intervention in Zaire in 1978, Combat Studies Institute, 1993; and Leavenworth Paper #14, Dragon Operations: Hostage Rescues in the Congo 1964-1965, CSI, 1989. Colonel Odom was also co-author of Certain Victory: the US Army in the Gulf War with then Brigadier General Robert H. Scales, Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Terry Johnson.


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## archade (Dec 6, 2008)

Igor Zhdarkin. We Did Not See It Even in Afghanistan. Moscow Memories Mockba, 2008. Translated by Tamara Reilly. 399 pp. 

 Reviewed by Elaine Windrich 
 Published on H-SAfrica (November, 2008) 
Commissioned by Peter C. Limb 

 A Russian View of the Angolan War 

 This book is to be welcomed as an alternative to the usual accounts of the Angolan War by South African participants and their apologists. For here is a Russian version, by a military officer, Igor Zhdarkin, who served as an advisor/translator to the Angolan armed forces known as FAPLA (Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola), the military wing of the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). His account is published as part of a collection of memoirs in the series Oral History of Forgotten Wars by the Africa Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Unfortunately, in the introduction, Gennady Shubin, senior research fellow at the institute, does not indicate what other “forgotten wars” are to be included in the series or why they have been so labeled.

The English section of Zhdarkin's recollections (consisting of the final 150 pages of the 400-page book, the first part of which comprises the Russian version) consists of two major parts: a diary kept by Zhdarkin from October 10 to December 3, 1987, as military interpreter of the 2lst FAPLA brigade, and the author’s “oral narratives,” or tape-recorded memories, produced at the Africa institute since 2000-01. Unfortunately, the “Notebook-Diary” in part 1 is a great disappointment because the author’s daily “recollections” come to an abrupt end in December 1987, before the crucial battles for Cuito Cuanavale had even begun. As his final entry (dated December 3) reads, “our brigade is in its positions in the forest. We are awaiting a possible enemy attack and we have no idea of what will happen next” (p. 302). Nor does the reader know what happened next, since Zhdarkin disappears from the scene of  battle, only to return to Cuito Cuanavale after the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) initial assaults on the “Tempo Triangle” have been rebuffed in 1988. None of these decisive battles, which are recorded in great detail in the South African accounts of the war (irrespective of their triumphant distortions), are mentioned by Zhdarkin. Only in a later commentary does he explain that he returned  to Cuito Cuanavale on March 11, 1988 (after more than two months at the FAPLA base at Lobito), adding only that, “I cannot say why I returned. But I was summoned there” (p. 368). Then, from the final reading in the diary, the book leaps into the “author commentaries” recorded in Moscow from 2000, separated only by a song written by Zhdarkin in Cuito Cuanavale in December 1987. 

Even with this abrupt ending of the diary, the daily entries should not to be underrated, since they contain a vivid account of the 1987 battles for the control of the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) stronghold of Mavinga, which reached a climax at the crossing of the Lomba River toward the end of that year. For this is where FAPLA was forced to withdraw under heavy bombardment by the SADF, which had intervened to save their UNITA ally from annihilation. Once again, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi claimed the victory for his forces, and even his U.S. benefactor, President Ronald Reagan, intervened with a message of congratulations for the “heroes of the Lomba River.” 

But none of these particular events are recalled in the book as the diary opens with the retreat from the Lomba River crossing. From there, Zhdarkin and the 2lst brigade began their long march to join the other FAPLA brigades, which were regrouping in the aftermath of the disastrous rout to prepare for the defense of their key base at Cuito Cuanavale. The retreat was indeed a harrowing experience, as the title of the book reveals, since FAPLA troops were under continual bombardment by the SADF, along with the sniping, mining, and other harassment by the UNITA forces on the ground. As the author relates, even the Russians who had served in Afghanistan had never experienced such “horrors” as the barrage of SADF artillery across the Lomba River. Under fire from the G-6 guns and the Mirage and Buccaneer aircraft, FAPLA brigades panicked and deserted the field in flight, leaving behind their Soviet equipment in a graveyard of tanks, trucks, ammunition, and other materiel. At one stage of the retreat (according to Zhdarkin), they were even bombed with “chemical weapons containing poisonous gas,” against which they had no gas masks for protection (p. 269). Finally, and after nearly two months of retreating under fire, the author was able to join the 
Soviet advisors of the 59th and 16th brigades awaiting the defense of Cuito Cuanavale. 

The commentaries that constitute the second part of the book contain a wide range of subjects, beginning with an account of the training and preparation of Soviet advisors for service in Angola and ending with an explanation for the Angolan defeat in 1987. In between, the author reveals his views of the participants in the conflict, including FAPLA, South Africans, and Cubans, and the Soviet advisors’ interactions with them. Some commentaries are in the form of questions to and answers from the author, including those that a tourist or visitor might ask, such as the prevalence of snakes (how many did you see?) and alcoholic beverages (how much did they drink?). But many more questions are concerned with the types of Soviet weapons used and their effectiveness for the Angolan terrain, which are shown in the photographs in the book. 

The most revealing commentaries are those concerning the author’s opinion of the participants. On first impressions of Angola, he found Luanda “more horrible” than other places he had visited. “Just a pile of shit,” he described it, as he viewed “the dirty airport and the ragged women and children on the floor” (a scene also observed by this reviewer) and the piles of rubbish covering the streets of Luanda (p. 314). As for the Angolan soldiers, they were  “unsuitable for war.” Not only were they “afraid to take part in combat actions,” they were also unwilling to follow the “reasonable advice” of their Soviet advisors (p. 341). Consequently, it was necessary for the advisors to tell the Angolans that they were wrong and beat them up accordingly. As the author explains, because many Soviet advisors were not familiar with “the peculiarities of the black Angolan mentality,” they often found it difficult to relate to them and obtain results (pp. 312-313). 

In contrast, the author does not say anything “bad” about the South Africans. “They fought well and competently because they were whites, because I myself am white and because South Africa related to us as whites to whites” (p. 369). He was also impressed by the “ultimatum” delivered to Soviet soldiers inside the shells fired by the SADF artillery: “Soviets, leave Cuito Cuanavale. We don’t want to touch you--our so-called white brothers. We want to cut up the Angolans” (p. 363). 

The most effusive praise was rightly reserved for the Cubans, without whom the author would not have survived to record these memoirs. It was the Cubans who had supplied them, fought and died for Angola, and forced South Africa to sue for peace after having allegedly destroyed most of their tanks and driven the SADF out of Angolan and back over the Namibian border. In effect, “the Cubans did everything of importance” to ensure that the defense of Cuito Cuanvale would succeed after the disastrous retreat from the Lomba River described in the diary (p. 379). Above all, they tried to persuade the Soviet advisors that they must “adapt” to the Angolan soldiers on whom they relied and not judge the situation in Angola as if it were the Soviet Union (p. 379). 
 The book ends with an addendum on the memoirs of South African Chief of Staff General Jannie Geldenhuys in which Zhdarkin doubts the accuracy of the general’s tally of South African gains and losses during the fighting in Angola in 1987-88. This is scarcely surprising since the purpose of the general’s account was to convey the impression that the SADF not only won the war but also brought “peace” by fighting it. This is followed by two appendices, one an extensive collection of photographs of participants and military equipment and the other a note recording the names of the Soviet military advisors who had served in Angola since November 1975, of whom there were thousands of servicemen and officers, including generals, admirals, and “civil specialists.”


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## archade (Dec 19, 2008)

Robert M. Cassidy. Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. Stanford Stanford University Press, 2008. 224 pp., ISBN 978-0-8047-5966-3. 

Reviewed by John Reed 
Published on H-War (December, 2008) 
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine 

The Usual Suspects, the Standard Indictment 

Three interrelated arguments structure Robert M. Cassidy's Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War_. First, Cassidy finds that the U.S. military is doctrinally ill-equipped to resolve the "paradoxes of asymmetric conflict" against global Islamic insurgencies in the post-9/11 world. Secondly, he conducts post mortems on a selection of twentieth-century counterinsurgency campaigns and traces their failed outcomes to defects in the counterinsurgent power's "military culture" and "preferred paradigm of war." And finally, he distills from these struggles the operational principle most essential to success in counterinsurgency: "leveraging partners and local forces to fight a protracted war" (p.127), anticipating General David H. Petraeus's 2007 embrace of the "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq's Anbar governorate. Cassidy's study is an excellent review of the _operational_ history of twentieth-century counterinsurgency based on a greater diversity of case studies than either John Nagl's _Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife_ (2002, reissued 2005) or Marc Galula's_Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_(1964, reissued 2006). 

Cassidy gives the Russian and U.S. armies low marks in counterinsurgency while praising the British for empirically distilling the principles now enshrined in Army Field Manual 3-24 _Counterinsurgency_ (December 15, 2006). Before 2003, however, the U.S. Army's senior leadership focused on force structures and doctrine, appropriate to high-intensity maneuver warfare to the exclusion of all forms of unconventional conflict. Cassidy identifies the usual suspects and arraigns them under the now standard 
indictment issued by Andrew F. Krepinevich in his 1986 _The Army and Vietnam_. Harry Summers, Caspar Weinburger, Colin Powell, their contemporaries and successors said "never again" to guerrilla warfare and transformed the army under AirLand Battle doctrine to enable it to defeat the Soviet army short of the Rhine without the use of theater nuclear weapons in a war that never occurred. 

However, Cassidy's thirty-year extension of Krepinevich's indictment entails two fundamental anachronisms. First, before 1991 the Group of Soviet Forces Germany posed a greater threat to national security than any combination of insurgent groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And secondly, no one in the U.S. Army's senior leadership could have anticipated receiving the mission to conquer, occupy, and administer Iraq in 2003 without the essential supporting elements of non-kinetic national power. Thus, no conceivable reallocation of resources within Training and Doctrine Command could have prepared the army for the _specific_ nonlinear environment it encountered in Iraq as a result of profound failures at the strategic level that deprived the army of coherent strategic direction, nonpoliticized intelligence, in-country interagency cooperation, and sufficient stabilization assets. In the aftermath of this crippling strategic failure, we have been presented with a succession of counterinsurgency techniques in search of achievable war aims no less troubling than the Vietnam War's "strategy of tactics." 

This highlights a central limitation of security studies that discuss the strategic and operational levels of the Long War in isolation from each other. The impression one receives from Cassidy's text is that any counterinsurgency can be defeated through environmentally adaptive doctrinal innovations _alone_, which somehow "trickle up" to constitute strategic success. He dismisses Clausewitzian categories as mechanical and linear, irrelevant to the "age of information dominance and global insurgents" (p.150), revealing his unfamiliarity with Clausewitz's anticipation of nonlinearity, a concept essential to understanding the relationship between cause and effect in the global war on terror.[1] One of Clausewitz's key insights was that grave errors at the strategic level cannot be corrected by operational and tactical virtuosity, but must instead force the national leadership to modify or abandon its initial war aims. Thus, however adeptly the _army_ institutionalizes lessons learned from the Philippines, Nicaragua, Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, the _nation_ will continue to risk failure in the future whenever it franchises out to its military the effort to achieve a political end state which cannot be achieved _operationally_ through application or non-application of state violence, the army's professional core competence. Cassidy criticizes the Vietnam era obsession with firepower and military technology, but he has reified counterinsurgency _technique_ in its place. 

Cassidy has written an otherwise useful survey that implies that the army, operating autonomously at the operational level, can compensate for flawed, contradictory, or nonexistent strategic direction in the Long War. However, expanding the counterinsurgency playbook and criticizing previous generations of army leadership (safe enough when they're retired), no longer qualifies as "thinking outside the box." While officers in the field must try one thing after another until something works, security intellectuals (who are not dodging explosively formed penetrators and do not receive officer evaluation reports) must address all elements of the struggle that bear on national success or failure, to include the current reversal of the correct hierarchical relationship between civilian strategic direction and theater command. _That_ would assist the army out of its current morass. _Then_ we can begin a discussion critical to the post-Iraq "get well" period. For the present, the army will continue to "go after the bad guys" with predator drones or soccer balls, as situationally appropriate. However, in the near future it needs to learn how to protect itself, the nation it serves, and the Anglo-American tradition of civilian control, while simultaneously pushing back against war aims determined by domestic political considerations and chimerical "new realities."
Note 

[1]. Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlineraity, and the Unpredictability of War," _International Security_ 17 (1992-1993): 59-90. 

Citation: John Reed. Review of Cassidy, Robert M., _Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War._. H-War, H-Net Reviews. December, 2008.


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## archade (Dec 20, 2008)

Janice E. McKenney. Organizational History of Field Artillery, 1775-2003. Washington DC Center of Military History, United States Army, 2007. xviii + 394 pp., ISBN 978-0-16-077114-9, ISBN 978-0-16-077115-6. 

Reviewed by Boyd L. Dastrup 

Organized to Fight 

Over the years, the U.S. Army's Field Artillery has played a critical role in combat. At the Battle of Trenton on December 25, 1776, during the American Revolution, Continental Army field cannons commanded by Captain Alexander Hamilton cleared the streets of Hessian soldiers. Two years later on June 28, 1778, American field guns drove the British from the field at the Battle of Monmouth. Almost sixty years afterward, at Palo Alto on May 8, 1846, American gunners under Major Samuel Ringgold and Captain James Duncan viciously repelled Mexican attacks at the outset of the Mexican War of 1846-48. In these battles and others, including those of Operation Desert Storm of 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first years of the twenty-first century, American field artillery played a key role in defeating enemy ground forces. Such actions have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Frank E. Comparato's _Age of Great Guns: Cannon Kings and Cannoneers Who Forged the Firepower of Artillery_ (1965), Fairfax Downey's _Sound of the Guns: The Story of American Artillery from the Ancient and Honorable Company to the Atom Cannon and Guided Missile_ (1955), and Robert H. Scales's _Firepower in Limited Wars_ (1990), to name a few, focus on battles and leaders, and the accomplishments of field artillery in action. 

Former Chief of the Organizational History Branch, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Janice E. McKenney approaches the history of field artillery from a different perspective. Rather than concentrating on battles, she examines the Field Artillery's organization since its creation in 1775, making her book a unique contribution to the literature that complements William E. Birkhimer's _Historical Sketch of the Organization, Administration, Materiel and Tactics of the Artillery, U.S. Army_ (1884), and Boyd L. Dastrup's _King of Battle: A Branch History of the U.S. Army's Field Artillery_ (1992). With this focus, McKenney takes the reader behind the scenes. She writes about staffing, training, organizing, and equipping field artillery units during peacetime and preparing them for battle. These activities, although unglamorous, provided the Field Artillery with the ability to supply effective fire support on the battlefield. The author concentrates on different people than the more traditional histories about field artillery in combat. 

The author, therefore, discusses the contributions of Captain Alfred Mordecai who served on a board to examine foreign artillery during the early 1840s. The board's report, better known as the Mordecai report, detailed smoothbore artillery material with exact detail and specification, and divided American artillery into siege, coast, fortress, and field. His system was eventually approved for adoption by the secretary of war in 1849. Almost forty years later, the American army introduced its first steel field guns. Here, the author examines the work of Brigadier General Stephen V. Benét, the chief of the Ordnance Department. Under his direction, the Ordnance Department developed the M1885 3.2 inch steel field gun mounted on a steel carriage. Although it gave the American army a long-range, powerful cannon, the M1885 still failed to keep pace with smokeless powder steel breechloaders with on-carriage recoil systems being introduced by the Europeans. 

 McKenney discusses the evolution of equipment, including the adoption of nuclear field artillery cannons, rockets, and missiles in the 1950s; precision munitions in the 1990s; and automated fire control systems, such as the Field Artillery Digital Automated Computer, the Tactical Fire Direction System, and the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System. In addition, she writes about the creation of the Corps of Artillery in 1901, and the separation of the Coast Artillery from the Field Artillery in 1907 as advocated by Brigadier General Joseph P. Story, chief of Artillery. He saw the need for organizing the Field Artillery into battalions and regiments to bring it into line with the lessons learned from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. These actions placed the Field Artillery on equal footing with the Coast Artillery for the first time in American military history. Beginning in 1775, when McKenney begins her analysis, with few exceptions, the Coast Artillery received most of the attention and funding because it was the country's first line of defense against an enemy naval attack. 

Other of her unsung heroes are Major Carlos Brewer, Major Orlando Ward, and Lieutenant Colonel H. L. C. Jones who were directors of the Gunnery Department at the Field Artillery School in the 1930s. With assistance from their instructors, these individuals' efforts led to the development of the fire direction center, a critical breakthrough that permitted shifting and massing fires effectively and responsively on the battlefields of World War II and after. Major General David E. Ott, the commandant of the Field Artillery School in the 1970s is another key figure. Under his supervision, the school developed the fire support team that revolutionized forward observation by making it organic to maneuver units for the first time. 

By discussing the evolution of equipment, organization, training, and staffing through 2003, McKenney's book adds a critical dimension by going beyond reciting the story of field artillery in battle, and furnishes a much needed corrective to the history of the American army's Field Artillery. Equally as important, she examines the relationship between the Coast Artillery and the Field Artillery when they formed composite artillery regiments between 1775 and 1901. 

In telling the history of artillery, McKenney takes the story from the days when small guns were attached to infantry brigades for close support to battalions or brigades, and concludes her analysis at the beginning of the twenty-first century when division and corps artilleries dominated field artillery organization, and when precision munitions were becoming more widespread to give the Field Artillery the ability to hit within six meters of a target to destroy it with a minimal amount of collateral damage. She also notes that the creation of brigade combat teams with their organic field artillery battalions replaced the division as the army's chief fighting organization, and, thus, decentralized Field Artillery operations. 

McKenney does a solid job of describing how field artillery is organized to fight, how the fire direction center ties the firing batteries together into a team to facilitate massing fires on targets, and how the forward observer is tied to the fire direction center. This explanation certainly gives readers without any background in field artillery organization and operations a fundamental understanding of the branch and its role on the battlefield. Without a question, her book should occupy a spot on the bookshelf of any serious student of the Field Artillery.


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## archade (Dec 20, 2008)

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Michael Schwartz's War Without End: The Iraq
War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)

[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell
University.]

The Iraq War has been among the greatest disasters in modern
American history. Michael Schwartz’ illuminating new book War
Without End: The Iraq War in Context provides a comprehensive
overview of the ideological roots of the war and its harrowing social
costs for the Iraqi people. He argues quite convincingly that rather than
it being purely a matter of administrative incompetence and
mismanagement, the ideological zealotry of leading neo-conservatives
was a principal cause of the American failure to establish political
legitimacy after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He shows how
neo-liberal policies and the rapid privatization of state resources backed
by a doctrine of massive force helped to exacerbate the suffering of
ordinary Iraqis who increasingly turned to resistance against U.S. power
and rule and remain disdainful of the occupation.
According to Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook
University, America’s war aims were clear from the outset: to create a
strategic base for the establishment of control over the Middle East’s
prized energy reserves and to usher in an economic transition from the
“socialist dictatorship” of Saddam Hussein to an unfettered free-market
capitalist state capable of serving as a model for the region. In the
aftermath of the invasion, Lieutenant L. Paul Bremer and his staff
moved to rapidly privatize state resources, including the formerly
state-owned oil industry and all sectors of the economy including the
health and educational systems. They rewarded multinational
corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel with major contracts to help
rebuild the country’s infrastructure, which had been devastated during
the shock and awe campaign and previous wars and economic sanctions.
The consequences of these policies were profound: They confirmed for a
large number of Iraqis that America had invaded the country for
self-serving reasons. Furthermore, they caused a social and economic
crisis of epic proportions, which gave strength to the insurgency. The
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dismantling of state industries caused the loss of thousands of jobs,
which were replaced by foreign contractors. Local businesses were
bankrupted by the flooding of the country with cheap imports and by a
lack of regular electricity. Unemployment rates in the once prosperous
nation skyrocketed to over 60 percent. Massive corruption in the
rewarding of contracts and the dismissal of skilled local technicians
resulted in gross inefficiency. This trend was typified by a failed $70
million dollar Halliburton project to reconstruct an oil pipeline in Al
Fatah, which came to resemble, as one observer put it, “some
gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad.”
Most disconcerting was the decline in health and educational services
bred by the U.S. occupation and war. Schools damaged by the fighting
were never properly repaired and lacked basic textbooks and school
supplies. The U.S. military sometimes even used schools as a staging
base for military incursions. By 2007, UNICEF reported that only
one-sixth of Iraqi children were being educated at all. After dismantling
the state health-care system, which had been among the best in the Arab
world before Hussein’s ascent to power, occupation officials promised to
construct dozens of private clinics across the country. Most of these
never materialized, resulting in a decline in accessibility of basic
medicines and equipment. In the newly “liberated” Iraq, doctors would
fill out prescriptions that the pharmacies could not provide. Family
members of patients even had to serve as nurses and IVs and needles
had to be reused. Over time, doctor shortages and the imposition of
curfews in cities made the situation grow worse. The inability of
occupation officials to provide clean water throughout the country
resulted in outbreaks of cholera and other diseases which the hospitals
were ill-equipped to treat. The overflow of raw sewage into city streets
was another factor breeding disease in the teeming urban slums of Iraqi
cities which came to resemble something out of a Charles Dickens’
novel.
One of Schwartz’ important contributions is to show how the failure of
America’s privatization and “nation-building” programs contributed to
the rise of the insurgency in Iraq. Rather than being composed of “dead
enders,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous words, or foreign jihadists
or ex-Bathists, he demonstrates how resistance was in fact driven by
“local factors that grew strength from deep grievances and a widespread
hostility to the presence of foreign troops,” as U.S. intelligence analysts
concluded. In the early phases, many Iraqis staged demonstrations
against the occupational authorities demanding basic social services and
jobs. Rather than seeking to respond to their demands, the authorities
instructed the military to greet any act of dissidence as suspicious and to
shoot at any perceived threat. U.S. soldiers consequently fired upon
peaceful crowds and killed and wounded civilians, thus stoking popular
anger. Many more innocent civilians were killed by fearful Marines at
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often poorly marked checkpoints throughout the country. The routine
raiding of homes designed in part to strike fear among the population
helped to further stoke popular anger and resentment, as did the
prevalence of deplorable prison conditions and the revelations of torture
as at Abu Ghraib. The U.S. construction of a gaudy multi-billion dollar
embassy made apparent America’s ambitions to remain in Iraq
indefinitely.
In order to try to maintain its grip on power, and in clear violation of
international law, the U.S. adopted a doctrine of collective punishment
designed to annihilate not only the insurgent fighters but anyone who
harbored and supported them. The consequence was the perpetration of
many massacres, such as the notorious incident at Haditha where 24
civilians, including women and children were slaughtered by Marines.
The doctrine of collective punishment was on display during the siege of
Fallujah where the U.S. military killed thousands of people and turned
the entire city into “a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted
homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees,” in the words of
New York Times journalist Erik Eckholm. A marine lieutenant
proclaimed afterwards: “This is what happens if you shelter terrorists.”
As these comments reveal, the siege of Fallujah was intended as a
warning sign to others that it would suffer the same fate if it defied U.S.
power.
Much like the Vietnamese in an earlier American failed colonial
intervention, the Iraqis refused to bow to U.S. pressure and thus paid a
high price in fighting for their sovereignty and independence. The
backbone of the resistance took root in Sunni as well as some Shia cities
like Sadr city where local warlord Muqtada Sadr gained in prestige not
only by defending Iraqi cities from attack but also by seeking to provide
basic social services that had been abandoned under the occupation. The
resistance in Iraq, however, was never unified and became factionalized
and ridden by sectarian tensions which culminated in the onset of
full-scale civil war. The war’s ugliness was compounded by the tactics of
many insurgent fighters - particularly the small number of Al Qaeda
operatives in Iraq whose agenda was to expel the U.S. from Iraq and
establish a caliphate through the Arab Middle East embodying the
principles of Salafi Islam. They adopted terror techniques such as
suicide and car bombings directed against supposed colonial
collaborators and Shia, which only intensified public suffering. Criminal
gangs seized upon the violence and chaos to carry out the looting of
public resources and facilities and to extort money for ransom.
According to Schwartz, the United States bears a large share of the
blame for creating a climate in which these trends emerged. In his view,
the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq resemble those of the U.S. in Fallujah with
the aim of inducing civilians to withdraw their support for the enemy
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once they experienced the agony of punishment. Contrary to the false
impression given by a majority of America’s mainstream media, through
the extensive air campaigns and search and destroy missions, U.S. forces
and their proxies bear responsibility for the majority of both civilian and
combat deaths, which scientific studies have placed at well over one
million. Schwartz estimates plausibly that the U.S. has been responsible
for at least 57 percent of the killings, many of which he attributes to a
hysterical use of firepower by American troops in urban combat zones.
The much vaunted “surge” strategy of President George W. Bush only
worsened the carnage and further inflamed Iraqis, which remains weary
of the American presence and continues to live in conditions of utter
destitution. The U.S. backed Maliki government and military,
meanwhile, remain predominantly powerless outside Baghdad’s Green
Zone due to the growing strength of the sectarian militias who control
many neighborhoods.
On the whole, while destined to create controversy, Schwartz has written
a very powerful book on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its devastating
consequences for the country. He sheds great insight into the mindset of
American policy-elites and military officials and documents the stark
brutality of their programs. He demonstrates furthermore that the rise
of insurgency in Iraq was not irrational or driven exclusively by an
Islamicist agenda or hate but was rather a product of the arrogance of
American occupying officials and the failure of U.S. state-building
policies and neo-liberalism, which failed to guarantee basic social
services and thereby helped to facilitate Iraq’s social decay. Most of all,
Schwartz reminds us who the true victims of the war are. In order to
move forward the next administration needs to accept accountability
and not simply withdraw troops but provide reconstruction and
reparations aid so that Iraqis can rebuild their country on their own
terms.


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## archade (Dec 26, 2008)

Donald P. Wright, Timothy R. Reese. *On Point II: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005: Transition to the New Campaign*. Fort Leavenworth Combat Studies Institute > Press, 2008. xviii + 696 pp., ISBN 978-0-16-078197-1. 

Reviewed by Gian Gentile 
Published on H-War (December, 2008) Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine 

A Starting Point 

Writing "current history" is not an easy task for historians because it involves delving into topics that are often loaded with domestic political implications. It also involves writing about people who are still active in the topic of the current history. Yet, it is very important for professional historians to bring their expertise to the field of current history, if for no other reason than to provide an important corrective to other accounts of the recent past by pundits, so-called experts, journalists, and bloggers of various shapes and sizes. 

The war in Iraq is a perfect case in point. Already, a very misleading narrative has been created by memoirists, journalists, and others. That narrative goes like this: because of the U.S. Army's lack of counterinsurgency doctrine and preparation prior to the start of the war it fumbled at counterinsurgency after the fall of Baghdad in spring 2003 until the end of 2006. But then, as a result of newly written counterinsurgency doctrine and inspired leadership, plus an additional five U.S. combat brigades that all entered into the mix in early 2007, Iraq and the American army were rescued. This flawed narrative puts the U.S. Army and U.S. foreign policy on a trajectory toward more Iraqs and Afghanistans. 

The interlocutors of this flawed narrative are legion. But a few examples of the texts, articles, and blog entries that have built the matrix-cum-metanarrative include Tom Ricks's _Fiasco_, published in 2006 (and one can only assume Ricks will add more force to the matrix in his forthcoming _The Gamble_ [2009]); Steve Coll's recent lengthy and gushing article in the _New Yorker_ on General David H.Petraeus ("The General's Dilemma," September 8, 2008); and Pete Mansoor's, John Nagl's, and Fred Kagan's numerous writings arguing that prior to the surge the U.S. Army just didn't "get it." 

Yet, a corrective is needed to these writings and the role that they have played in constructing this flawed narrative, a red-pill, so to speak, to jar folks out of the complacency of understanding created by the matrix. 

A good--no, excellent--starting point to balance our understanding of the recent past in Iraq is the army's newly released history of the first eighteen months of the war, _On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign,_ written by Donald Wright and Timothy Reese. Both Wright and Reese are historians at the army's Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Reese is an active-duty army colonel, and is currently serving as an advisor team leader for an Iraqi army division in Baghdad. Wright and Reese had the help of CSI's Contemporary Operations Study Team in writing the book. 

_On Point II_ is a meticulously researched work that relies on extensive use of primary documents such as unit reports, operational orders, logs, briefings, and letters, along with observations made in popular media by journalists and experts. The book begins in May 2003 after the American invasion to remove the Saddam regime, and ends in January 2005 with the first Iraqi elections. (_On Point II_ is a follow-up history to the army's 2005 _On Point_, which covered the invasion and regime removal.) Reese and Wright cross many levels of command, and views, from the individual soldier to the highest political authority in Iraq. The picture presented to the reader is, thus, one of complexity, breadth, and nuance, written in a narrative style that is easily understood and followed. It is a must-read for historians, analysts, and others who are interested in developing a more balanced picture of the first eighteen months of the war in Iraq. (One assumes that more volumes will follow _On Point II_ as the United States continues operations in Iraq). 

Instead of using a strict chronological format, _On Point II_'s fourteen chapters are divided into five thematic parts. Part 1, "Setting the Stage," provides an overview of Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with a chapter on the army's historical legacy of counterinsurgency. The key chapter in part 1 is an exploration into the causes of the rising Sunni insurgency in 2003 and 2004, with some descriptions of early insurgent tactics, and the U.S. Army's quick adaptation to it. Part 2, "Transition to a New Campaign," shows how the army adapted its tactical and operational systems from major combat operations to what the book calls full-spectrum, nation-building operations. Quick adaptation to counterinsurgency and nation-building by army units across the board in Iraq and _not_ hide-bound adherence to visions of fighting World War II all over again is a major point of part 2. Part 3, "Toward the Objective: Building a New Iraq," focuses on the army's efforts at reconstructing the Iraqi economy and infrastructure, the Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi governance. Part 4, "Sustaining the Campaign," concentrates on the army's internal logistics operations. The conclusion to_ On Point II_ comments on the implications of the army's first eighteen months in Iraq and prospects for the future. The book also has an extensive number of charts, statistics, briefing slides, and excerpts from orders and plans that scholars and analysts looking for unclassified, primary material on army operations in Iraq will find useful. 

As the authors point out, "transition" is a central organizing theme of_ On Point II--_that is to say, army units (platoons, companies, battalions, brigades, and divisions) shifted from major combat operations to counterinsurgency and nation-building operations. And, after all was said and done, _On Point II_ concludes that across the board for the first eighteen months in Iraq, the American army (even without a formal doctrine in counterinsurgency and nation-building operations) quickly made the transition, and by the end of 2003 was conducting "best practices" in these types of operations. 

This is not a conclusion that fits the standard narrative put forward by the matrix. But, as _On Point II_ makes clear, the U.S. Army actually adapted quickly and effectively to conditions in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Contrary to the caricature created by books like Ricks's _Fiasco_, during the first eighteen months the army was not a knuckle-dragging, conventional-minded force wanting only to kick in doors in the Sunni Triangle as a surrogate for its true desire for fighting Normandy all over again in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Instead, _On Point II_ argues the opposite: that a conventionally trained and minded army can quickly and effectively step in a different direction to engage in counterinsurgency and nation-building operations. Policymakers and soldiers considering the future organization and primary mission of the U.S. Army should pay attention to _On Point II_'s conclusions. 

If there is one critical and overarching point of analysis that _On Point II_ drives home throughout the book, it is that even good tactical units practicing good counterinsurgency tactics and nation-building operations cannot make up for failed policies and strategies. 

_On Point II_ is a very useful corrective to what has become conventional wisdom about the first eighteen months of the war. It is current history at its finest.


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## archade (Jan 4, 2009)

Keith Yellin. Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership. Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 2008. x + 191 pp., ISBN 978-1-57003-735-1. 



 Battling Talk
If you have ever wanted to know what military leaders say to their troops on the eve of battle, why they say what they say, and whether it makes any difference, then you should start your investigations using Keith Yellin's new book, _Battle Exhortation._ It is an unusual book on several accounts. First, it deals with a topic--pre-combat language--that few have analyzed properly, even though most of us have seen many examples on TV, in film, and perhaps in reality. Second, it deals with the topic in a serious scholarly way that avoids the temptation to lead the reader into an alley labeled "this is how you are supposed to do it." Instead, Yellin proceeds bytrawling through a vast arena of time and space to illustrate his arguments with a wide variety of cases. We get to understand how the Spartans approached battle, and why it differed from the Athenian approach; what it was like to follow Hernan Cortes into what is now Mexico; what Julius Caesar said to his cohorts; and what General George S. Patton and General Tommy Franks said. By definition there is not enough space to provide much in the way of context but Yellin does well to squeeze in just enough material to make better sense of such exhortations than books of speeches that merely list them. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the book is the way that the followers are brought into play so that their commanders' rhetoric only makes sense insofar as the followers are already socialized to expect certain forms of talk, and so that the followers play an active role in making sense of the words and actions. 

The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1, "Bracing for Combat," differentiates the particular features of combat discourse from other forms of discourse, in particular the immediate need for reassurance or invigoration as the battle appears imminent. Chapter 2, "Indoctrination," looks at the efforts to socialize the listeners of such rhetoric--who are often a much wider audience than the group of troops listening directly to the speaker. Chapter 3, "Tensions," brings out the underlying aspects of combat that may weigh down the troops but are beyond the understanding of civilians: the role of pride and reputation that so often motivates soldiers far more than ideology, the naked violence of the battle itself, the social and physical distancing between leader and followers, and the love that holds together "brothers in arms" and now "brothers and sisters in arms." Chapter 4, "Evolutions," examines the changes across time of leaders' rhetoric, not just whether Caesar spoke differently than General Dwight D. Eisenhower, but whether (and why) General Norman Schwarzkopf and Franks wrote different messages to their troops on the eve of the first and the second war in Iraq. 

The book is a well-written and well-illustrated journey through space and time on the world's battlefields. It is certainly worth a read for those interested in language and leadership generally, and combat leadership in particular. For non-American audiences, it is perhaps too firmly set in the American historical context, though there are lots of non-American examples. For academic audiences, there is,perhaps, too much taken on trust--for example, the role of Caesar in writing his own account of his extraordinarily effective combat rhetoric might be taken with a larger degree of skepticism. And, it might have been interesting to have considered more of the performative aspects of language--the role that words play in constituting rather than simply describing the world as we know it. But, given the breadth of audience that Yellin is clearly trying to reach, this may well have been a step too far. Moreover, his claim about the importance of combat rhetoric--and its strange omission from most military curricula--is surely well made.


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## archade (Feb 1, 2009)

A. J. Birtle. U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2006. xv + 570 pp, ISBN 978-0-16-072959-1, ISBN 978-0-16-072960-7.

Reviewed by Joseph Babb (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College)
Published on H-War (January, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

Counterinsurgency and Stability Doctrine Déjà vu

Anyone who wants to understand the background of how the U.S. Army adapted its doctrine to better conduct operations in Iraq and Afghanistan should read this book.  Not only will the reader learn about counterinsurgency theory and doctrinal development from the Second World War through the end of the Vietnam conflict, they will gain  a broad, yet nuanced, understanding of this complex and dynamic form of warfare, and how it was, and is being, fought.  This book is an outstanding follow-on to A.J. Birtle's U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 published in 2003.  Both of these volumes are part of the curriculum at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

 Between 1942 and 1975, occupation duty and military government; dealing with Wars of National Liberation; understanding Mao's People's War methodology; and fighting numerous low intensity conflicts dominated military operations for the U.S. Army.  Although the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, and the conventional force standoff in Europe are the more often studied Cold War events, counterinsurgency and contingency operations are more representative of what the military actually did during this period.  Birtle, very successfully and very clearly, explains how the army adapted to and met the nation's need to conduct counterinsurgency and limited peacetime contingency operations.  Readers will find themselves frustrated as they learn of  a bureaucracy fighting necessary change, but also hopeful as they read of the  people and processes that designed and implemented systematic change in a very large and diverse organization. 

After an excellent stage-setting introduction the book is arranged chronologically.  Birtle then describes the operations conducted during a specific period, assesses lessons learned or observed, and discusses how new doctrine was either written or adapted as the conflicts and missions progressed.  Chapters 2 through 4 look at four advisory efforts (China, Greece, the Philippines, and Indochina) and at counterguerrilla operations in Korea to offer an analysis of the state of army doctrine on the eve of the Vietnam period.  Chapter 5 highlights contingency operations and Cold War era interventions in Lebanon, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic.  In perhaps the most interesting and enlightening chapter in the book, chapter 6 ("The Counterinsurgency Ferment, 1961-65"), Birtle paints a picture of an army in turmoil, trying to come to grips with a form of conflict it was not trained, organized, or prepared to fight on the scale demanded by the national leadership. This period is also highlighted in chapter 1 ("Brushfires on a Cold Dawn") and chapter 2 ("The Revolution That Failed") in Andrew Krepinevich's book, The Army in Vietnam (1986).   

It is not hard to make comparisons of this period with the army's struggle to develop counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after the successful initial operations.  In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 131, directing counterinsurgency education and training for the appropriate government agencies.  Similarly, President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44 in December of 2005, directing very similar tasks and actions.  Then, as now, both the army and the nation struggled to provide a comprehensive and consistent civilian-military approach to these complex political-military operations.  Chapter 7, which looks at the military advisory efforts in Latin America and Asia from 1955-75, is also extremely relevant to ongoing operations.  In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (in his National Defense Strategy document) discussed the critical importance of training and advising host nation military forces.  The military is reconsidering doctrine, education, and training for U.S. forces as U.S. military advisors on various transition teams, deployed with both Iraqi and Afghani security forces, are taking on a more significant role. 

The last three chapters delve into the Vietnam conflict, and how doctrine was written, applied, revised, and reapplied; they also examine changes that were made in training and educating the Army.  Birtle rightly highlights the critical role played by the Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, who from 1964 to1967, personally directed the research, writing, and updating of counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine to insure a workable and consistent approach to this type of warfare.  Once again, the comparisons to recent efforts to update and write new doctrine stand out.  Linda Robinson's recently published book Tell Me How This Ends:  General Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (2008) details David H. Petraeus's leading role.  While General Petraeus commanded Fort Leavenworth--home of the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center, and its Command and General Staff College--the army published Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations (December 2006), arguably the first comprehensive counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War era.  In addition, the army recently published Field Manual 3-07 Stability Operations (October 2008), updating a manual first published under General Johnson's guidance in 1967.   

 In his final chapter, The Counterinsurgency Legacy" Birtle concludes with the insight that the core of Army counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine, although “revised and refined,” was "essentially unchanged" (p. 468). Looking at the long sweep of counterinsurgency and contingency doctrinal development from 1860 to 1970 detailed in  Birtle's two books, we see evolution and revision, but no revolution, in military thought about this complex form of warfare, and the conduct of military operations in such an operational environment.  If Birtle writes a third volume covering 1976 to 2008 the conclusion would probably be much the same--adaptation and evolutionary change.  If our army has conducted so much of this type of warfare and our doctrine has really changed so little, why do we constantly have to relearn old lessons?  Sadly, one has to ask the question:  why is it that the army will not study its own history and read its own doctrine?  Birtle has provided two excellent and well-documented volumes of history and analysis of counterinsurgency, and contingency doctrine and operations.  This second volume, covering the period 1942 to 1975, is a must read for every military officer, student of military history, and citizen concerned about how the military is going to deal with terrorism, insurgency, and failed states in an era of persistent conflict, as well as for all those interested in studying change in large organizations.


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## archade (Feb 1, 2009)

John Francis Guilmartin, Inc. NetLibrary. A very short war: the Mayaguez and the Battle of Koh Tang. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. xxi + 238 pp. ISBN 978-0-585-17507-2.

Reviewed by Adam B. Siegel (Center for Naval Analyses, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)


In A Very Short War, John Guilmartin provides a rich examination of the last episode of the U.S. war in Indochina--the multi-service operation to recover the merchant ship Mayaguez and her crew from the Khmer Rouge less than a month after the final U.S. evacuations from Phnom Penh and Saigon. Through a detailed operational-tactical study of this discrete political-military event, Guilmartin seeks to illuminate how the modern "communications revolution will create as many problems as it solves" (p. 29), rather than being an undiluted good as many may think.

In April and May 1975, the U.S. military conducted a series of three discrete military operations that put an end to the (U.S.) Vietnam War: Frequent Wind (the evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 12 April); Eagle Pull (the evacuation of Vietnamese and Americans from Saigon, South Vietnam, 29-30 April); and the Mayaguez recapture (12-15 May). Guilmartin opens the book with a discussion of Frequent Wind and Eagle Pull; then, after setting the scene, he turns to the events of the Mayaguez capture and the U.S. response to the Khmer actions. President Gerald Ford "quickly settled on three overlapping objectives: recover the ship and the crew; avoid...hostage negotiations; and mount a demonstrative use of US force to bolster America's international credibility" (p. 38). The interaction of these three objectives created a time imperative and determined the forces to be used: U.S. Air Force helicopters from Thailand to carry Marines airlifted from Okinawa to recapture the ship and rescue the crew; air support from Air Force aircraft operating from Thailand and Navy aircraft from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea conducting retaliatory strikes against the Cambodian mainland. In the intense operations over the next three days, U.S. forces killed perhaps a hundred Cambodians and bombed a variety of Khmer facilities. This came at a high price, with fifteen Americans killed in action, three more missing in action, and fifty wounded; four helicopters shot down; and another helicopter crashed with twenty-three killed (p. 28).

The Mayaguez operation raises many points to consider in regard to the "communications revolution" in a period when at least some in the U.S. military believe that the "information revolution" might allow total knowledge at higher command. President Ford and others in Washington certainly had reason to believe they had (nearly) perfect information for decision-making. As one of the earliest actions during the crisis, a U-2 strategic reconnaissance plane was put in the air to act as a communications relay between forces on the scene and higher headquarters. Despite (or because of) these efforts to have improved communications, White House attempts to control the tactical situation caused near disaster on at least two occasions during the operation.

-- At one point, the White House had issued orders to sink anything coming off Koh Tang Island. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stalled for time, unsure of the propriety of this sort of tactical control. His delay perhaps prevented an attack on a Cambodian fishing boat carrying the Mayaguez crew from the island to the mainland (pp. 55-56).

-- As soon as the White House learned that the Mayaguez crew had been released, orders went out to cease all offensive operations and "to disengage and withdraw all forces...as soon as possible." This order almost prevented a reinforcement of the forces on the island that was crucial to ensure the withdrawal from Koh Tang (p. 107).

As these examples suggest, the realities of this Very Short War should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone expecting that the increased communications capabilities are an unadulterated good.

Within this book are many other fascinating insights into the U.S. military in the waning days of Vietnam involvement (and, perhaps, militaries in general). For example, Guilmartin discusses the changes occurring in the training and tactics of the helicopter squadrons as they moved from a wartime environment. Not surprisingly--but perhaps dismaying--even by 1975 USAF helicopter training was constrained by peacetime restrictions. Guilmartin's emphasis on the differences between specific units suggests the point that these differences might be opaque to higher headquarters and the civilian leadership not familiar with "tactical" details that are crucial for making tactical decisions.

Guilmartin, then a U.S. Air Force officer, was a "participant-observer" in this operation, handling maintenance for one of the two USAF helicopter squadrons. Although this book is published twenty years after the event, Guilmartin brings an immediacy to the work that only someone so close to it could. Guilmartin was not, however, simply a participant in the events discussed in this book. In 1975, he had just returned to the operating forces after three years at Princeton University completing his Ph.D. dissertation [1], followed by four years teaching at the Air Force Academy. Thus, Guilmartin was a trained historian and data gatherer, as well as a decorated rescue pilot with 119 combat missions in Southeast Asia. With his academic background, Guilmartin began gathering information as the operation proceeded and began interviewing with the idea of helping preserve (and, in part, create) a historical record of the operation that provides a key basis for this book.

This aspect of the work is one that fascinates. As Guilmartin phrased his approach, "Even before the smoke cleared, I was automatically trying to find out what had gone wrong and why" (p. xvi). This near-participation in the actual events allows him to provide a much richer context than archival material or (with more modern events) interviews alone can offer.

In a way, Guilmartin's strengths create the basis for some of the shortcomings of A Very Short War. After finishing the book, readers will feel confident that they have a deep understanding of the U.S. Air Force's helicopter forces involved in the Mayaguez affair, and a long appendix on the principal helicopter involved (the H-53) provides important technical background. When Guilmartin moves on to other USAF elements and other services, however, the depth of description and, therefore, understanding decrease. For example, Guilmartin describes the differences between the two involved helicopter squadrons--one a special operations and the other a rescue squadron--and how their H-53 helicopters were equipped, how their tactics differed, how peacetime training rules since the end of the war in Vietnam had affected their readiness, and their differing philosophies to life and combat.

In contrast to the treatment of the USAF helicopter forces, A Very Short War contains almost no similar details about the Marines who were, after all, the principal combat troops on the ground and who suffered the majority of the casualties. We learn little of their weapons, of their training background, or of how the Vietnam experience affected their approach to the battle on Koh Tang.[2] There is a table listing USAF tactical assets in Thailand (p. 49), but nothing similar for the other services. In a footnote, Guilmartin states that U.S. Navy aircraft did not provide air support to the battle on Koh Tang because "carrier-based A-7Es and A-6s were not equipped with radios capable of communicating with the Marines on the beach" (pp. 211-12, text on p. 99). In contrast to the detail on the H-53s, Guilmartin does not explain why U.S. Navy aircraft did not have the capability to support Marine Corps operations in 1975 when, after all, this had been a principal role for U.S. Navy aircraft during the Vietnam War and remained, at least on paper, one of the principal tasks for all naval aviators. In another example, while we learn the names of many of the H-53 pilots, almost none of the involved fighter or reconnaissance pilots receive the same attention. Somewhat in line with the focus on the rescue pilots, A Very Short War has only the briefest references to the strike missions into the Cambodian mainland that occurred in conjunction with the rescue operation.

Less applicable to the substance are some shortcomings in the notes and bibliography, some suggestive of editorial lapses. For example, several works cited in the footnotes never have full citations. Guilmartin refers to a General Accounting Office study on the Mayaguez published in 1976, yet cites it oly through another source and never directly.[3] In some cases, the citations are not strong. In addition to the detailed discussion of the Mayaguez incident, Guilmartin discusses other, frequently rather poorly known, U.S. military operations, such as Operation Babylift--an evacuation of orphans from Vietnam. The key study for "Babylift" (a Military Airlift Command monograph) does not make the footnotes.[4] For Operation Urgent Fury (the invasion of Grenada), the citation is to a 1990 Wall Street Journal article, rather than to any of the numerous books and monographs on the operation.[5]

Thus, A Very Short War is not a perfect work, but it is a very good one. In combination with Christopher Jon Lamb's Belief Systems and Decision Making in the Mayaguez Crisis (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1989), A Very Short War provides a history of the Mayaguez incident that should satisfy all but those with the most profound interest, and the footnotes and bibliography will provide the basis for further reading. In addition, Guilmartin provides enough detail and context for non-participants to gain an understanding into some of the complexities of modern warfare and how Clausewitz's nineteenth-century concept of friction can emerge in a twentieth-century battle.

A Very Short War should be on the reading list of those interested in the command and control of military operations, in the interaction of policy and tactical military activity, and in the modern U.S. military in general. Any library with a collection interest in the modern (U.S.) military should have this on their purchase list. John Guilmartin is an excellent writer with a keen insight into a crucial part of this operation--anyone with the slightest interest will find his book fascinating and worthwhile reading.

Notes

[1] John Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleons: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974). This study of naval developments in the sixteenth century remains one of the most impressive historical studies I have ever read.

[2] For a USMC-focused discussion of the operation, see Maj. George R. Dunham and Col. David A Quinlan, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973-1975 (Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1990), pp. 237-265.

[3] Comptroller General, "The Seizure of the Mayaguez: A Case Study of Crisis Management," a report to the Subcommittee on International Political and Military Affairs, House Committee on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976).

[4] Coy F. Cross II, MAC and Operation Babylift: Air Transport in Support of Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (Scott Air Force Base, Ill.: Military Airlift Command, Office of History, Nov. 1989).

[5] There is a wide range of literature on Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury), which I will not attempt to recreate here. In addition to the footnoting problem, Guilmartin comments on "Urgent Fury" that "Published accounts suggest that inadequate intelligence and the lack of adequate maps were--as with the MAYAGUEZ affair--a major cause of embarrassment" (p. 158). I think that this understates the importance of these problems, as one can point to the lack of adequate maps (for example, no joint maps with gridded squares) as one of the potential causes for some of the friendly fire incidents that occurred during "Urgent Fury."


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## archade (Feb 1, 2009)

Ben Shepherd. War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. vi + 300 pp, ISBN 978-0-674-01296-7.

Reviewed by Lee Baker (Department of History, University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College)


German Security Divisions and Soviet "Partisans"

For the last several years the most interesting debates about the brutality of the Second World War on the Russian front have revolved around trying to explain the process by which seemingly ordinary men became embroiled in routinely murdering innocent civilians. Ever since the publication of Omer Bartov's seminal book, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, it has been impossible to maintain that the Wehrmacht stood aloof from the mass murders which occurred after the invasion of the U.S.S.R.[1] This book adds a highly nuanced layer of understanding to the discussion by examining the anti-partisan operations of several security divisions operating in Army Group Center's rear.

The Wehrmacht faced an intractable partisan problem during its invasion of the U.S.S.R. during World War II. Historians' interpretations as to how the Germans dealt with it, beginning with Bartov, have spawned a rather large literature explaining the spiral into mass murder. The central question of this literature is generally the same: how and why does the repression of active and armed opposition shade into atrocity? This question is made more difficult when asked of German anti-partisan operations because it is difficult to separate what could be perceived as military necessity from those actions that flowed from the racist anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic philosophy that permeated parts of German society during the first few decades of the twentieth century. This book is a superb attempt to clarify how each of the pieces of the puzzle fit together and explain how the Germans fought their anti-partisan operations behind the eastern front, and why they ultimately failed.

The book begins, logically, by examining the evolution of German anti-partisan theory beginning with the Franco-Prussian War through the radical changes made after the invasion of Poland in 1939. It continues with an analysis of anti-partisan operations after the invasion of the U.S.S.R. through the end of the first year when partisan operations were embryonic and unorganized. The bulk of the book is spent on the field campaign of 1942-1943, when Army Group Center faced increasingly organized partisan operations in its rear. This, the core of the book, focuses on the ad hoc evolution of Wehrmacht policy, ultimately culminating with a confused, contradictory, and self-defeating mishmash of initiatives by mid-level officers.

The book focuses on the security divisions whose responsibilities included protecting the vital rear areas behind main operations at the front. It examines, in particular, the activities of the 221st Security Division. This unit served in the general area between Mogilev and Gomel, which today marks the approximate border between Belarus and Russia, and was one of the areas most plagued by partisan operations. Using the reports its officers wrote to document its activities, Shepherd follows the unit's activities from 1941 through the summer of 1943, after which records no longer exist.

Perhaps his most important conclusion is that the descent into murder began with the "systematic consideration of circumstances, more than ... preexisting personal inclinations" by the officers who led the various units of the 221st (p. 232). The key, according to Shepherd, is that the men who staffed the security divisions were too old, under-equipped, poorly trained, rarely reinforced, and in general provided with inadequate resources for their demanding tasks. The lack of any real ability to effectively combat the partisans led the units to adopt various expedients that, it was hoped, would counterbalance their material inadequacies. Thus extreme violence resulted from frustration, fear, and both perceptions of and actual material inferiority. Scared and angry soldiers killed because it was one of the few ways they could exercise control over their environment. Shepherd identifies further factors within the division that encouraged unbridled violence. Preexisting prejudice among the rank and file may have been only a secondary cause of unit violence, but the ideological and genuine anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism of the unit's leading officers, especially its commander and operations officer, were important factors. Shepherd adds to this underlying base several additional factors that depended upon particular circumstances, including the "criminal orders" issued by the supreme command just before Operation Barbarossa began. This created a permissive atmosphere in which an increasingly frustrated and fearful unit expressed itself in brutal behavior towards civilians.

These factors, which operated relatively separately during the first months of the war, combined and intensified during the fall of 1941 (especially during September) to radicalize the anti-partisan effort. The body count exploded during this period as the failure to defeat the U.S.S.R placed enormous pressures upon the 221st. This exacerbated its already less than ideal situation. It suffered from a lack of mobility due to fuel shortages and a lack of vehicles, the detachment of its best, and usually most mobile, units for action at the front, and the expansion of its territory as the front advanced eastwards. It was during this period that the unit began to equate Jews with Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks with partisans, and began the mass shootings of Jews whom it labeled partisans in its reports. But Shepherd shows that what intensified repression at this particular moment was not solely the ideological factors but cold pragmatism as well, as the increasing pressures felt by the division led it to lash out at not only actual enemies, of whom there were as yet few, but potential ones as well.

The rest of 1941 and 1942 witnessed a surge in partisan activity, as men sent specifically to organize a partisan movement joined Red Army stragglers and as the local population became disillusioned with German policy. Shepherd points to the failure of German agricultural reforms and the expansion of forced labor as key factors in this growth. In addition, both the division and Hitler issued directives which permitted the troops to cast restraint aside whenever they felt threatened. As the tasks assigned to the 221st increased in proportion to the territory it was assigned, the increasing intransigence of the population, combined with an increasingly permissive attitude towards repression, created a scenario wherein the 221st was bound to fail. These problems also led the 221st to attempt a less violent approach during 1942, when a concerted "hearts and minds" campaign was launched. This effort originated not with a desire by the Wehrmacht to be more civil in its treatment of civilians, but rather in the complete inability of the unit to maintain a high level of effective violence; a more benevolent policy was thus an expedient designed to overcome the unit's limitations. Shepherd shows that both violence and the lack of violence had the same essential root causes: German inadequacy.

Rather than trying to provide an overall, and therefore generally correct but specifically over-simplified view of anti-partisan operations, Shepherd provides us with a piece of the mosaic; the bigger picture could perhaps be filled in by other studies which focus on Army Group South (particularly its operations around Kiev) and Army Group North (especially in the Baltic countries). This book makes very important contributions to the debate about the nature of violence on the eastern front and should be read by all those who study that sector of the war.

Note

[1]. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Several of his subsequent works have followed this trail.


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## archade (Feb 1, 2009)

John Nagl. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxix + 249 pp, ISBN 978-0-226-56770-9.

Reviewed by Anthony J. Joes (Department of Political Science, Saint Joseph's University)


Leave It to the Marines?

Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, possesses very impressive credentials. A graduate of West Point, where he later taught national security studies, a Rhodes Scholar, and an Oxford DPhil in International Relations, he led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm, and served as an operations officer in Iraq in 2003-2004.

This book evolved from his doctoral thesis; the title is a quotation from Lawrence of Arabia. In it, LTC Nagl considers the question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they have not been prepared; or more bluntly, why the American Army had such a hard time in Vietnam. Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker liked the book so much that he ordered copies for every four-star general and contributed a foreword to the second edition.

Nagl compares two case studies: the experiences of the British Army in the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) and the American Army in the Vietnam conflict (1961-1975). The book consists of four parts: a setting-the-stage discussion, followed by separate examinations of Malaya and Vietnam, and a concluding "lessons" section.

Nagl relies heavily on concepts from the field of organization theory, declaring that "the primary argument of [this] book is that the better performance of the British Army in learning and implementing a successful counterinsurgency doctrine in Malaya (as compared to the American Army's failure to learn and implement successful counterinsurgency doctrine in Vietnam) is best explained by the differing organizational cultures of the two armies; in short, that the British Army was a learning institution and the American Army was not" (p. xxii). "Organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British Army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but why the American Army failed to do so in Vietnam" (from the book cover). The American Army's dedication to conventional war-fighting--to the destruction of the opponent--prevented it from arriving at, or even looking for, the correct formula for defeating the insurgency in South Vietnam.

Although the book has been widely praised, it raises some concerns. Consider first the use of a single case from which grand conclusions are drawn. Nagl does not remind his readers that not only the United States, but all major military powers of the twentieth century--the British, French, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Soviets and Russians--have encountered great difficulties in suppressing insurgencies. Consider also that Nagl compares Malaya, widely accepted (perhaps too uncritically) as a textbook example of successful counterinsurgency with Vietnam, usually (and even more uncritically) offered as a textbook example of the opposite type. Nagl is of course aware of the structural problems inherent in his comparison, admitting that "the two conflicts were very different in scale, geography, and level of external support provided to the insurgents" (p. xxv). But that is quite an understatement. The British had very long experience in Malaya. On that peninsula bordered by pro-Western Thailand, they easily prevented outside aid to the insurgents, whom their forces outnumbered 28 to 1, and enjoyed the reflexive support of the Malay half of the population. Nevertheless it required twelve years to suppress the insurgency. In Vietnam, invaded daily by an implacable and well-equipped enemy, the Americans and their allies had a numerical advantage of merely 1.6 to 1, yet they broke the guerrillas in three years (a fact which the chattering classes have never grasped). Indeed, the Tet Offensive stemmed from the Viet Cong's inability to sustain their enormous casualties. And under General Creighton Abrams the Americans did in fact generate an effective system of counterinsurgency, which Nagl acknowledges and then dismisses.

But there is much more to the issue than that. Had Nagl compared Vietnam to British counterinsurgency in Palestine or Cyprus or Aden or Northern Ireland, the British Army would not have emerged looking quite so good nor the Americans quite so inept. Recall that in Northern Ireland, the British Army was operating in an English-speaking province no bigger than Connecticut and with one-third its population, where it enjoyed proximity to its bases, an overwhelming numerical ratio to the guerrillas, and the support of the great majority of the civilian population. Still, it took well over twenty years to bring the IRA in Northern Ireland to heel. And, Nagl notes correctly that despite its century of experience in small wars, between 1948 and 1951 "it is difficult to argue that the British Army [in Malaya] developed a successful counterinsurgency doctrine" (p. 78). In contrast, from 1965 to 1968 the American Army reduced the Viet Cong from a menace to a nuisance. Since, moreover, as Nagl suggests, the British Army's supposed culture of adaptability derived from the larger national culture, he seems close to blaming American soldiers for not being British.

Was the alleged gross American failure in Vietnam (a position that requires one to ignore the very effective changes under General Creighton Abrams) entirely or even mainly due to the Army's "inability to learn"? Recall that during the Vietnam conflict, the United States and its allies were confronted by overwhelming Soviet power in Europe; conventional strength, not small-war prowess, was going to determine the fate of the West. Moreover, the British did not have to contend with any Ho Chi Minh Trail, which the politicians in Washington forbade the Army to close, the key decision of the entire Vietnam conflict, and the one from which almost all the lamentable experiences of the Americans there flowed. Nor did the British face the North Vietnamese regular Army (at the time one of the very best in all Asia), whose increasing involvement in the war infinitely complicated the U.S. counterinsurgency task. Above all, does the American Army's drive to "get the war over with" not reflect the notorious impatience of a large element of the American people, impatience stoked by news media eager for the latest photogenic outrage? According to Nagl, "television was almost unknown during the Malayan campaign" (p. 94). Thus the British Army in Malaya could not be hounded by anything like the omnipresent and increasingly adversarial U.S. media, whose grotesquely incompetent reporting of the 1968 Tet Offensive went far to turn American opinion against the war. What if television had been absent from South Vietnam? Conversely, would it have been possible, with our contemporary media, to win through to victory in World War II, if the casualties of the first few days of Normandy had been trumpeted? Would the Battle of the Bulge have been presented as evidence that Roosevelt and Marshall had been lying about Germany's imminent defeat? How would today's television networks have presented the staggering losses to kamikaze attacks at Okinawa?

Toward the end of his book, Nagl concedes that "the very attributes that allowed the British Army to respond to the demands of counterinsurgency in Malaya--decentralization, minimal use of firepower, independent and innovative theater commanders--made it a less effective learning organization on the conventional battlegrounds of World War II" (p. 219). From this he concludes that "the demands of conventional and unconventional warfare differ so greatly that an organization optimized to succeed in one will have great difficulty in fighting the other" (p. 219). Does this mean that improving the American Army's admittedly inadequate approach to counterinsurgency will reduce its ability to fight conventional war? If yes, is that a good idea? The American Army was organized and trained first to defeat the Axis and then to deter the Soviets. It accomplished both tasks well. Had it failed at only one of those tasks, nobody today would be discussing either Vietnam or Iraq. Clearly this question deserves wide and thoughtful discussion.

Better than an either/or approach to the problem, as Nagl himself suggested in another venue, might be for the Army to assume responsibility for "clearing" a territory of conventional hostile forces and turning over responsibility for "holding" that territory--fighting guerrillas--to local or regional forces. Or might it be best to leave counterinsurgency mainly to the Marines?

All these difficulties aside, John Nagl has produced a book that is vigorously written, accessible to non-specialists, grounded in original research including primary sources and personal interviews, and animated by the passion of a highly talented and deeply dedicated professional officer. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife will reverberate in national security circles for a long time.


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## archade (Feb 1, 2009)

Jon Lee Anderson. The Fall of Baghdad. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. viii + 375 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-303585-5.

Reviewed by Wm. Shane Story (U.S. Army Center of Military History)


An Iraqi Tragedy

Like a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare, Jon Anderson has raced after America's war on terror without catching his prey. Nevertheless, the race has made a good story. A veteran foreign correspondent, Anderson returned to old haunts in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11 to report on the fall of the Taliban. A year later, Anderson published The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan(2002), but the world's attention suddenly shifted to Iraq and Anderson continued the chase. The Fall of Baghdad is Anderson's travelogue of the next twenty-one months, from Saddam's referendum and prisoner amnesty in October 2002 to Ambassador Paul Bremer's self-congratulatory departure from Baghdad in June 2004. Anderson's writing emphasizes details, colors, and the ambience of the places he visits and the facial expressions of the people he meets and cultivates as sources. For background material, Anderson jumbles years and events--1958, 1920, 1979, an assassination, a coup--suggesting hidden meanings in such anachronisms. Anderson sees contradictions everywhere, and he dresses them up as riddles. Offering intrigue at the expense of analysis or answers, Anderson's riddles bear only a patina of wisdom.

Developing portraits of a few Iraqis to give his story depth, Anderson emphasizes the experiences of Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam Hussein's doctor, favorite artist, and confidant. Bashir saw Hussein as a ruthless survivor, and his system of survival depended on tyranny. Tyranny, Bashir thought, was a virtual prerequisite for governing Iraq, so even its mass killings--or killings of the masses were not beyond the pale, because they were necessary to sustain the state. On the other hand, Bashir damned the regime he served for its unmitigated corruption, for "dictatorship, for murder, for torture and bloodshed" (p. 70). The system culminated in Saddam's despotic son Uday, a psychopath, serial rapist, thief, and murderer who transformed tyranny into recreation and "humiliated many Iraqis, many officials" (p. 292). Bashir believed such corruption sealed the regime's fate; someone had to overthrow Saddam.

Bashir admired western democracies and thought that life was worthless in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and communist China, and yet "no place was crueler than Iraq" (p. 71). Although Bashir prospered because Saddam survived, he held America responsible for Iraq's fate. Just as the United States kept Castro in power in Cuba, Bashir thought, the United States kept Saddam in power for its own purposes. Most Iraqis must have shared Bashir's impression of America's virtual omnipotence, because when the Americans came, resistance seemed pointless and the regime collapsed. Bashir claimed vindication; "I was expecting this" (p. 291).

The regime's swift collapse hardly seemed predictable in the midst of the invasion. The bombing campaign, which General Franks had billed as "shock and awe," was impressive in its scale and precision, but it failed to topple the regime. Once American forces reached Baghdad, however, panic set in and civilians fled. When Iraqi soldiers declined to fight, the government fell and disorder spread. Initial encounters between American forces and Iraqis tended toward friendly amusement in an atmosphere of liberation. Disorder grew, however, as looting escalated into mob frenzies. With the situation out of control, American forces began stopping traffic, erecting barriers, implementing curfews and detaining hundreds of suspects. Anderson left Iraq in late April 2003, when the Americans seemed to be re-establishing authority and laying the groundwork for a transitional Iraqi government.

Weeks of instability, however, kept Iraq in the headlines, and Anderson returned to Baghdad in the latter half of June 2003. An American official warned Anderson that Iraq was a mess and very dangerous, especially around the western towns of Ar Ramadi and Al Fallujah. The American enterprise, the official thought, gave every sign of failing. In Baghdad, Anderson found Bashir full of complaints about the Americans. Americans gave the impression of listening and caring about Iraqis' welfare, Bashir said, but they did not deliver on their promises. Moreover, tribal chiefs complained that the Americans dissembled about their intentions and had failed "to put things right"(p. 319). Anderson's visit to an American unit in Fallujah confirmed his worst fears about the American forces' inability to comprehend or deal with Iraqis. The troops were lost, and the chain of command was in denial. An American battalion commander, whom Anderson described as enthusiastic, stated, "Fallujah is a success story" (p. 328). Anderson's tour of Fallujah with an armored patrol indicated otherwise. At one point, Anderson witnessed an unwinnable testosterone-driven clash between a Fallujah shopkeeper and an American soldier, a "psy ops officer, a beefy man in his thirties" (p. 331). The American, who presumably thought his pierced tongue was an expression of stylish independence, found it brought only insults and ridicule from the Iraqis. Fear and respect were long gone, and laughing young Fallujans toyed with the Americans as a prelude to attacking them.

Month by month the situation deteriorated. Iraqis demanded solutions and respect from the Americans, but denounced and assassinated other Iraqis for working with occupiers. American actions seemed clumsy and inept, whether it was cracking down or backing off, all of it culminating in the stillborn Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first pictures of Abu Ghraib torture surfaced, followed by jihadists sawing off Nicholas Berg's head. Finally, Paul Bremer turned sovereignty back over to the Iraqis on June 28, 2004 and returned to Washington, satisfied that he had left Iraq better than he found it.

Anderson's style imposed its own limitations on his work. Long before the invasion, Anderson cultivated relationships with Iraqis approved by the regime--his driver, his "minder" from the Ministry of Information, and ranking regime insiders like Saddam's doctor--to provide personalities and depth for his stories. Anderson tracked these same individuals' lives after Saddam's fall. Anderson's regime-connected contacts accepted Saddam's demise as necessary, but they were stunned to see their own fortunes melt away as well. Theirs is the tragic story that Anderson relates, and not that of the Kurds or Shiites whose torture was Saddam and whose freedom was anything but Saddam.

As Anderson closed his work in 2004, he saw great risks in Iraq, both of a nationwide jihad against the Americans and of an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war. The Fall of Baghdad illuminates some of the prejudices and conflicts that energized the strife. Those insights make Anderson's work a worthwhile read, with the caveat that readers should not expect a developed or documented consideration of the failed defense of Baghdad or any comprehension of American military operations. Since Anderson offers no analysis, the wait continues for a capable study of the American war and the Iraqi crisis.


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## archade (May 8, 2009)

Luc Capdevila, Danièle Voldman, eds. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9, ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6. 

Reviewed by Monica Black (Furman University) Published on H-German (January, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher 

 A "Western" Way of War Death? 

War death, both among soldiers and civilians, and its social impact, have recently been topics of interest to historians across a variety of fields, writing on subjects as disparate as Civil War America, the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Germany, and post-1945 Europe.[1] The history of death--including the procedures of burial; how the living interact with the dead and imagine death and afterlife; and the evolving material culture surrounding the commemoration of the departed--is perhaps as old as humanity. As Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman suggest, however, certain historical developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--including the rise of nationalism; racially inspired war and genocide; industrial methods of warfare; aerial bombing; the obscuring of demarcations between home and fighting fronts; mass civilian death in war; and the use and threat of nuclear weapons--have dramatically altered how war death is perceived and memorialized, and have produced new practices for handling the dead. 

Rather than examining shifts in the perceptions and practices surrounding war death arising from any one national context or particular conflict, the authors focus instead on trends they see arising in the West, which they define as including western Europe, South America's Southern Cone, and North America. Within this "shared culture" (p. xv), it is the authors' central contention, experiences of war have "interrupt[ed], temporarily though persistently, the slow process which began during the century of the Enlightenment whereby the dead have been removed from the world of the living" (p. 182). The claim that the living want little to do with the dead in the modern West has its roots in the work of such scholars as Geoffrey Gorer and Philippe Ariès.[2] Both argued in the 1960s and 1970s that western society had become alienated from death and tended to suppress grief. Gorer, in particular, famously claimed that, among Britons in the 1960s, death had become so taboo as to be practically a new form of pornography. 

With this conceptual framework in mind, Capdevila and Voldman set out to demonstrate how, in point of fact, violent conflict in the twentieth century has continually and inescapably forced the living and the dead together in a variety of ways. The blurring of distinctions between civilian and soldier, coupled with industrial methods of warfare, has produced unprecedented numbers of deaths; yet, the sensibilities of the twentieth century have tended to militate against the use of communal graves (commonplace until the American Civil War in the United States and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe). The living must thus seek carefully to locate and identify the remains of the dead and then to inter them individually, a massive undertaking under the best circumstances. New tools (such as dog tags) have been adopted to facilitate these processes. International legal norms have been developed for the treatment of "enemy" dead, although these norms have not infrequently been honored more in the breach than in the observance, as soldiers and civilians alike engaged in desecrating corpses or hiding the bodies of the dead to prolong the suffering of their enemies. While the vicissitudes of war have sometimes made preserving traditional ritual practices surrounding death impossible, societies have attempted nonetheless to maintain them, even in the heat of battle and as bombs rained down. Lastly, private and governmental associations to foster the remembrance of the war dead of individual nations have emerged; they bring communities together on key holidays to commune with the dead in national cemeteries and other sites of collective memorialization. 

The authors' observations and the topics they choose to explore are fascinating and certainly raise many interesting points for discussion. Yet the framework imposed on their study by the assumption that there is an identifiably "western" way of death, that can be generally applied over a great span of time and to many, rather distinctive, cultures, presents some analytical problems. The authors contend, for example, that "the glorification of war has been undermined by the horror of death" (p. 18). One is not sure what to make of this statement in the context of the contemporary United States. Whether or not horror is necessarily associated with war death (itself an arguable point), it would be difficult to maintain that war has lost its glorifying aspects for contemporary U.S. Americans. 

The study's generalizing tendencies also result in a lack of differentiation between types of violence, the ideologies that have inspired it, and the ensuing social impact of the deaths associated with that violence. _War Dead_ includes in its analysis the world wars, colonialist warfare, state-sponsored violence against domestic political enemies (as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s), the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and other instances of violence. Yet, the vastly different motivations and justification behind each of these events, in the many societies affected by them, certainly have a role to play in how the deaths associated with them have been and are today viewed. To offer but one example: the notion of sacrificial death and of soldiers' blood "consecrating" the ground where the dead fell--ideas with real currency in Nazi Germany--might in some ways be fruitfully linked across cultures; after all, they are identifiably Christian in motif and origin. But in Nazi Germany, those ideas were used not only to justify but to sanctify mass murder, and that sets them apart from similar ideas that emerged in other places and times. Attending to such differences is important if the history of death has a larger story to tell about the evolving symbolic life of various groups of people; about the construction of their moral, cultural, and social norms; and if it can be used to show us how ideology informs and reshapes the practices of everyday life. In a similar vein, it is difficult to see how can we usefully compare responses to death among the French, Germans, British, and 
Americans in World War II (which the parameters of the authors' analysis would seem to suggest that we can), given the strikingly different conflicts each of those societies saw themselves involved in, to say nothing of their dramatically different experiences during the war and the widely divergent outcomes each faced after May 1945. 

Notes 

[1]. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Catherine Merridale, _Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia_ (New York: Viking, 2001); Alon Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, eds., Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008); Monica Black, "The Meaning of Death and the Making of Three Berlins: A History, 1933-1961" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2006); and Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a 
Cultural and Social History of Europe_ _during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

[2]. Geoffrey Gorer, _Death, Grief, and Mourning_ (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1965); and Philippe Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death_ (New York: Vintage, 1981). Citation: Black. Review of Capdevila, Luc; Voldman, Danièle; eds., _War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War.


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## archade (May 8, 2009)

A. J. Birtle. U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. Washington, D.C. Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2006. xv + 570 pp. ISBN 978-0-16-072959-1; $52.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-16-072960-7. 

Reviewed by Joseph Babb (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College) 
Published on H-War (January, 2009) 
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine 

Counterinsurgency and Stability Doctrine Déjà vu 

Anyone who wants to understand the background of how the U.S. Army adapted its doctrine to better conduct operations in Iraq and Afghanistan should read this book. Not only will the reader learn about counterinsurgency theory and doctrinal development from the Second World War through the end of the Vietnam conflict, they will gain a broad, yet nuanced, understanding of this complex and dynamic form of warfare, and how it was, and is being, fought. This book is an outstanding follow-on to A.J. Birtle's _U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 published in 2003. Both of these volumes are part of the curriculum at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

Between 1942 and 1975, occupation duty and military government; dealing with Wars of National Liberation; understanding Mao's People's War methodology; and fighting numerous low intensity conflicts dominated military operations for the U.S. Army. Although the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, and the conventional force standoff in Europe are the more often studied Cold War events, counterinsurgency and contingency operations are more representative of what the military actually did during this period. Birtle, very successfully and very clearly, explains how the army adapted to and met the nation's need to conduct counterinsurgency and limited peacetime contingency operations. Readers will find themselves frustrated as they learn of a bureaucracy fighting necessary change, but also hopeful as they read of the people and processes that designed and implemented systematic change in a very large and diverse organization. 

After an excellent stage-setting introduction the book is arranged chronologically. Birtle then describes the operations conducted during a specific period, assesses lessons learned or observed, and discusses how new doctrine was either written or adapted as the conflicts and missions progressed. Chapters 2 through 4 look at four advisory efforts (China, Greece, the Philippines, and Indochina) and at counterguerrilla operations in Korea to offer an analysis of the state of army doctrine on the eve of the Vietnam period. Chapter 5 highlights contingency operations and Cold War era interventions in Lebanon, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic. In perhaps the most interesting and enlightening chapter in the book, chapter 6 ("The Counterinsurgency Ferment, 1961-65"), Birtle paints a picture of an army in turmoil, trying to come to grips with a form of conflict it was not trained, organized, or prepared to fight on the scale demanded by the national leadership. This period is also highlighted in chapter 1 ("Brushfires on a Cold Dawn") and chapter 2 ("The Revolution That Failed") in Andrew Krepinevich's book, The Army in Vietnam (1986). 

It is not hard to make comparisons of this period with the army's struggle to develop counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after the successful initial operations. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 131, directing counterinsurgency education and training for the appropriate government agencies. Similarly, President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44 in December of 2005, directing very similar tasks and actions. Then, as now, both the army and the nation struggled to provide a comprehensive and consistent civilian-military approach to these complex political-military operations. Chapter 7, which looks at the military advisory efforts in Latin America and Asia from 1955-75, is also extremely relevant to ongoing operations. In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (in his National Defense Strategy document) discussed the critical importance of training and advising host nation military forces. The military is reconsidering doctrine, education, and training for U.S. forces as U.S. military advisors on various transition teams, deployed with both Iraqi and Afghani security forces, are taking on a more significant role. 

The last three chapters delve into the Vietnam conflict, and how doctrine was written, applied, revised, and reapplied; they also examine changes that were made in training and educating the Army. Birtle rightly highlights the critical role played by the Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, who from 1964 to1967, personally directed the research, writing, and updating of counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine to insure a workable and consistent approach to this type of warfare. Once again, the comparisons to recent efforts to update and write new doctrine stand out. Linda Robinson's recently published book _Tell Me How This Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq_ (2008) details David H. Petraeus's leading role. While General Petraeus commanded Fort Leavenworth--home of the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center, and its Command and General Staff College--the army publishedField Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations (December 2006), arguably the first comprehensive counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War era. In addition, the army recently published Field Manual 3-07 Stability Operations (October 2008), updating a manual first published under General Johnson's guidance in 1967. 

In his final chapter, The Counterinsurgency Legacy" Birtle concludes with the insight that the core of Army counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine, although "revised and refined," was "essentially unchanged" (p. 468). Looking at the long sweep of counterinsurgency and contingency doctrinal development from 1860 to 1970 detailed in Birtle's two books, we see evolution and revision, but no revolution, in military thought about this complex form of warfare, and the conduct of military operations in such an operational environment. If Birtle writes a third volume covering 1976 to 2008 the conclusion would probably be much the same--adaptation and evolutionary change. If our army has conducted so much of this type of warfare and our doctrine has really changed so little, why do we constantly have to relearn old lessons? Sadly, one has to ask the question: why is it that the army will not study its own history and read its own doctrine? Birtle has provided two excellent and well-documented volumes of history and analysis of counterinsurgency, and contingency doctrine and operations. This second volume, covering the period 1942 to 1975, is a must read for every military officer, student of military history, and citizen concerned about how the military is going to deal with terrorism, insurgency, and failed states in an era of persistent conflict, as well as for all those interested in studying change in large organizations. 

Citation: Joseph Babb. Review of Birtle, A. J., U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. H-War, H-Net Reviews. January, 2009.


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## archade (May 8, 2009)

Alexander Watson. Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918. Cambridge Military History Series. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv + 288 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-88101-2. 

Reviewed by Jesse Kauffman (Stanford University) Published on H-German (May, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher 

Optimism in Hell, or: The Power of Positive Thinking 

It is remarkably easy to take for granted the simple fact the First World War went on for as long as it did because every day for four years, millions of ordinary men not only endured unimaginable horrors, terrible tedium, and abysmal living conditions, they also continued amidst all this to do the hard work of soldiering--and, quite often, to do it well. The men in the trenches not only held on to their sanity as the war raged around them, but continued to pick up their rifles and go "over the top," to emerge from their dugouts after having tons of high explosives rained down upon them, and to expose themselves to danger in countless other ways, despite having seen up-close what shrapnel, machine gun rounds, and rifle bullets 
could do to the human body. 

Alexander Watson did not take these matters for granted. He set out to explore how British and German soldiers withstood the stresses of war and continued to fight on the western front. The result is this prize-winning work. The explanation Watson offers for this remarkable endurance is suitably complex. Deploying British and German archival sources, including combatants' letters, and mustering an impressive mastery of the secondary literature not only on each army, but on combat motivation and military cohesion in general, Watson argues that a complicated variety of factors kept men on both sides going: religious belief, a sense that their cause was just and their side destined for victory, the influence of formal and more subtle, informal coercion, and the leadership of able and concerned junior officers. While much of this has been argued before, Watson gracefully pulls it all together in a seamless synthesis, enlivened by well chosen quotes from his sources, that is all the more impressive for the clarity of Watson's prose. Watson stakes his main claim to innovation on his incorporation of modern-day psychological research. He argues, based on this research and on contemporary wartime accounts, that unrealistic optimism is a natural component of human nature, a component particularly helpful to people dealing with highly stressful situations (like combat). Thus, Watson argues, British and German soldiers not only kept sane, but kept fighting because they believed, despite highly suggestive evidence to the contrary, that they would emerge from the conflict unharmed. This conclusion seems plausible, and is a welcome addition to the literature on morale and motivation. 

Also innovative is Watson's resolutely comparative approach, adopted to "avoid the cultural biases which may have crept into some of the existing almost exclusively national historiography" (p. 7). Enduring the Great War both testifies to the great potential of transnational and comparative work on the war and demonstrates the limitations of such an approach. At its finest, Watson's work reveals the shared human experience of the war. For example, he emphasizes that dark soldiers' humor (including the bestowing of silly nicknames on deadly instruments of war) played a role in helping combatants deal with the horrors on both sides of the front line; this point may seem minor, but in fact moves the discussion a long way from the images of German soldiers as Nietzsche-crazed, war-hungry madmen that still tend to surface in Anglophone scholarship on the war. Watson is also emphatic in his insistence that a strong belief in the defensive nature of the war drew men on both sides to the colors when war erupted. His analysis thus rejects the idea that a slavish, mindless obedience to authority led German men to serve, while British men joined the ranks out of a desire to take a principled stand in favor of Belgium. Still, Watson's insistence that cultural and social factors specific to each army were not as important as their shared essential humanity occasionally leads him to minimize some obviously important differences. The question of religion is one instance of this tendency. Watson notes that the German army was more deeply steeped in religious belief than the British. That these convictions had a major effect on combat motivation is strongly suggested by one of Watson's central sources, a questionnaire-based study conducted by a veteran combat officer, Walter Ludwig, who asked soldiers what they thought about in order to overcome their fears in the face of violent death. Religious belief is by far the predominant answer, suggesting that it should play a greater role in any attempt to analyze the morale and combat effectiveness of the German army. In addition, Watson himself admits that the British regimental system and the intense loyalties it could foster heavily influenced how the British army fought. This system had no real counterpart in Germany. 

One intriguing, and possibly enormously consequential, difference between the German and British armies that Watson highlights is the differing targets of soldiers' bitterness. On the British side of the trenches, anger at war profiteers rarely escalated into a wholesale indictment of the British political system. In contrast, Watson finds, similar anger in the German ranks quickly escalated into wholesale condemnation of the German social and political order. "We all know," one soldier from Berlin noted in his diary in March 1916, "that we are being sacrificed for the interests of a clique. We fight for the Prussian _Junker_ economy.... This clique has become the ruin of the German people" (pp. 75-76). This information strongly suggests that German soldiers did not feel themselves as tightly bound to the institutions that had ordered them into battle as British soldiers did, a contrast that goes some way towards explaining the phenomenon Watson focuses on in his last chapter, "The German Collapse in 1918." One of the book's strongest, the chapter combines narrative elegance with a clear, well-supported challenge to the reigning historiographical consensus. Watson trains his sights most clearly on Wilhelm Deist and his argument that a "covert strike" by German soldiers brought the war to an end. Watson offers the more plausible argument that exhausted German soldiers gradually but inexorably lost both the will and the ability to fight a war that, at they end, they finally understood they could not win. 

Watson further insists that the role of Germany's officers in bringing about the surrender of German troops on the western front in 1918 be made a central part of the story of the end of Germany's war. He is absolutely right; the part played by Germany's officers has been overlooked and needs to be examined. But Watson overextends himself here by arguing that Germany's officers expressly ordered their men to surrender in 1918. Watson bases this claim mainly on the fact that the officer/man ratio of Germans taken prisoner by the British from August to November 1918 was equal to the officer/man ratio of the German field army in July 1918. This data is certainly compelling, but doesn't quite support the argument. Watson shows indisputably that officers did indeed surrender; in addition, he uses contemporary accounts to highlight that officers were often crucial for carrying out the process of surrender. But, as he himself concedes, it is possible that these officers were forced to do so by their men. In any event, Watson has firmly implicated the officer corps in the steady erosion of the German army's effectiveness as a fighting force. We can hope that future research will elaborate on this still fairly mysterious chapter in the history of the German war effort. 

This style of argumentation is symptomatic of a recurring flaw in this book; it is highly ambitious and seeks to overturn our understanding of the war on virtually every point it touches on. As a result, sometimes the evidence is asked to support a greater revisionist load than it is really capable of bearing. Still, with its impressive use of archival evidence, its mastery of the relevant secondary literature, and its scrupulously fair-minded treatment of the German army, this book is well worth reading for anyone who seeks a glimpse inside the minds of the men, both British and German, who fought the Great War. 

Citation: Jesse Kauffman. Review of Watson, Alexander, _Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918_. . May, 2009.


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## archade (May 16, 2009)

'
Gail M. Presbey, ed. Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism". Philosophy of Peace Series. Amsterdam and New York Rodopi, 2007, ISBN 978-90-420-2196-9. 

 Reviewed by Charles Brown (Emporia State University), Emmer, C. E. (Emporia State University) 
Published on H-Peace (March, 2009) Commissioned by Robert A. Jacobs 

Philosophers Interrogate the War on Terror 

Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism_,_"_ assembled and edited by Gail M. Presbey, a collection of twenty original essays written by members of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, is the tenth in the Philosophy of Peace series from Rodopi's Value Inquiry Books. United in the belief that the current manifestation of the "war on terrorism" is both morally problematic and counterproductive to the pursuit of peace and justice, the authors of these essays offer a sustained and rigorous analysis of the "war on terrorism" in the same manner that philosophers have dissected such concepts as "just war," "domino theory," "collateral damage," "humanitarian intervention," and "just peace." The questions and issues that animate this book range from traditional topics in the ethics of war to questions about globalization, the meaning of democracy, and U.S. hegemony and empire. 

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many in the United States declared even the merest mention of the geopolitical and historical context for the attacks to be strictly taboo. Indeed, a philosophy professor told one of the review authors at the time that bringing up U.S. foreign policy so soon after the attacks was morally wrong. Though that stance has lessened over time, a related approach to shutting down open discussion of the attacks and the U.S. response to those attacks is still popular today, namely, to claim that anyone critical of U.S. foreign (or domestic) policy is promulgating "moral relativism." This charge was forcefully made early on in a tract, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It_, first distributed in November 2001 by Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney and Senator Joseph Isadore ("Joe") Lieberman's American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).[1] The pamphlet provided many quotations from university professors in reference to the attacks of September 11, adding the commentary that "'the message of many in academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST'"--clearly, the pamphlet went on to say, "'moral relativism has become a staple of academic life in this country'" (pp. 3, 5). Some of the quotations from academics provided in ACTA's pamphlet were indeed extreme, but practically none of them showed any evidence of a basis in moral relativism. Indeed, many of the quotations provided in the tract clearly rested not on moral relativism but instead on the idea that the same moral standard applies to everyone, which is the disavowal of moral relativism. At any rate, if Presbey's collection is any measure of the academic response, then academia is anything but morally relativistic (if anything, the proclivity of the current administration and its apologists to apply an all-but explicit double standard speaks much more of relativism than the opposed demand for context, criticism, and care). 

The collection's title, _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism,"_ raises the question, what is a _philosophical_ response to the "war on terrorism" in the first place? Certainly, a philosopher concerned with promoting peace could write a letter to the editor, take part in an antiwar rally, or donate to assist doctors working in Iraq. But are these specifically philosophical responses? Most would say not. What, then, can the philosopher contribute as a philosopher? On the one hand, the discourse surrounding the "war on terrorism" operates on a shockingly rudimentary level, due in large part to the administration's and the mass media's tendency to frame discussion of the "war on terrorism" in ahistorical "good"/"evil," "us"/"them" terms. With surprising nonchalance, government officials in the United States, for example, regularly refer to their critics not merely as "aiding and abetting the enemy," but as "terrorists."[2] Given this degraded discourse, practically any discussion of the "war on terrorism" and its presumed cause and effect--the attacks of September 11 and the occupation of Iraq--can be markedly improved simply by applying something as basic as the Golden Rule or pointing out the fallacy of false alternatives. On the other hand, precisely because of that concerted framing from above by the U.S. administration and the mass media, the efforts of those willing to contextualize the numerous issues involved are all the more necessary, and philosophers are particularly well equipped to do so. 

Granted, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, in a recent review of philosophers' treatments of William Shakespeare, has expressed the concern that "to make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should ... really _do_ philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101."[3] (Concerning the "war on terrorism," it would be hard to find a better example of just such a simplistic philosophical mash-up than Roger Scruton's _openDemocracy_ essay, which contended that Immanuel Kant would have approved of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.[4]) But a similar concern with spending too much time in Philosophy 101 can be seen in contributor William C. Gay's remark, at the outset of his second essay, that "if students submitted such highly fallacious work [as the National Security Strategy document] in an entry-level college course that stresses complying with basic principles of critical thinking, they would deserve a failing grade. Unfortunately, political documents, on which hinge the fate of the Earth, do not adhere to the standards of logic; so I will forego [such an undergraduate logic review]. 
Instead, I will turn to an assessment based on a comparison of the Bush Administration with previous administrations" (p. 132). However much some might equate philosophy with theory for its own sake, the 
members of Concerned Philosophers for Peace--judging from the essays in the collection--do not. Consequently, the essays in the volume range from sustained metaethical analyses, such as Edward J. Grippe's argument against a consequentialist "shootdown" policy for civilian passenger planes, to layered arguments that collect empirical evidence and draw connections between normally isolated dots, such as the editor's detailed case against the idea that the occupation of Iraq contributes to a lessening of world terror and the "Terrorism Case Studies" that make up part 4 of the book. 

To the extent that the "war on terrorism" is a "new kind of war," the meaning of the "war on terrorism" is still largely undetermined. The authors of the essays in this volume understand that the framework, 
justification, meaning, and scope of any new reconceptualization of the nature of warfare must not be left to political and media elites, especially given that these elites are working hard to obscure the issues at hand. The attempt on the part of the George Walker Bush (Bush II) administration to articulate a new war discourse that both describes and justifies this new kind of war must be contested, not only in a democratic progress of political dialogue which is sadly deficient in our contemporary information age, but also by professional philosophers who wish to stress the normative value of peace and justice. 

As the collection makes clear, rather than the familiar models of nation-states waging military action against another or regional liberation movements resisting occupation, the "war on terrorism" is a war against a tactic, a war with no clear understanding of what counts as victory, and a perhaps unending conflict which requires that the enemy remain indeterminate. The authors understand that it is imperative that philosophers use their particular skills of conceptual and logical analysis, and their ability to uncover hidden assumptions, contradictions, and double standards to help us understand more clearly what is at stake in this new kind of war. 

The issues and themes that animate this book run throughout the collection's sustained critique of the prosecution of the "war on terrorism" and that war's underlying national security strategy. Nonetheless, five basic questions--which correspond very loosely to the collection's main divisions--come to the fore. The first basic question turns on the language and rhetoric surrounding the "war on terrorism." Gay's opening essay begins the task of deconstructing the "official discourse" of the "war on terrorism" and challenging the government's "right of bestowing names" and the mass media's uncritical adoption of this rhetoric (p. 24). Key terms in this official war discourse--"terror," "democracy," "freedom," "WMD" (weapons of mass destruction), "rogue states," etc.--have been subtly defined in narrow (or, sometimes, exceedingly loose) ways that are often disconnected from international consensus or historical precedent. Within this rhetorical regime, concerns about WMD manage to overlook cluster bombs, carpet bombing from B-52s, and ordinance manufactured from depleted uranium; likewise, nations that refuse to be bound by the Geneva conventions do not qualify as rogue states. James Kunkel observes that the designation of terrorism has been limited to armed actions by hostile forces, while Jennifer Eagan argues that key U.S. policy documents reduce democracy and freedom to global markets compliant to U.S. corporate interests. This rhetorical regime constructs a legitimation of militarily enforced conformity conceived in the binary categories of "us vs. them," "freedom or tyranny," and "order or chaos." 

Dianna Taylor argues that this war discourse was constructed in the "crisis of meaning" that followed the mass murders of September 11. The shock, fear, anxiety, and terror widely felt could not be properly articulated within the fading categories of international relations shaped by the previous geopolitical period. Policies of massive overkill and mutually assured destruction no longer seemed relevant to military planners or strangely reassuring to an uneasy public. The Bush II administration promptly began to respond to this crisis of meaning by crafting a rhetorical regime to both describe and justify what we now know as the "war on terrorism." The Bush II administration framed the attacks and the subsequent "war on terrorism" with the patriotic sentiments of World War II as a new Pearl Harbor. Saddam Hussein was compared to Adolf Hitler, and, more recently, the now unending occupation of Iraq is being compared to the long-term American military presence in Germany, Japan, and Korea. These essays make clear that such politicized language of war undermines the language of peace--as well as reason, compassion, and sustainability. 

The collection's second basic question focuses on the possibility for democracy to act as a kind of remedy for terrorism or an aid to furthering human rights. Central to the rhetoric that defines and legitimates the "war on terrorism" is the claim that "democracy" is an effective remedy for terrorism. While the authors of these essays generally agree that democracy can be an antidote or remedy for terrorism, they typically argue that the current U.S. strategy of promoting and understanding democracy is flawed on several grounds. Peter Amato points out that current U.S. policies tend to empower local elites and foster dependency at the expense of democracy; Eagan argues that the Bush II administration's 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) document, a blueprint for the "war on terrorism," reconceptualizes "democracy" away from the traditional American understanding of democracy as understood in the Declaration of 
Independence and the Bill of Rights, i.e., away from the protection of individual rights of liberty and freedom and toward the primacy of unregulated markets. Current U.S. policies of rendition, secret 
prisons, and aggressive interrogation techniques widely understood to be torture and contrary to the Geneva convention promote no traditionally understood ideals of democracy; in fact, these policies undercut traditionally understood ideals of democracy as well as international efforts to bolster human rights. Amato suggests that the sort of democracy to best resist terrorism would be a democracy rooted in a citizens' dialogue aimed at understanding the Good, while Eagan suggests a conception of democracy that replaces the primacy of individual self-interest with mutual respect and reciprocity. 

The third basic question running through the collection asks, is the Bush II "war on terrorism" justified or effective? Gay's second essay approaches the question by asking whether the "new kind of war" the United States is waging is so new after all. This essay (one of the collection's especially clear texts) presents evidence that the presumably "unprecedented" Bush II preemption doctrine is, in fact, 
not a new policy, but rather (as the NSS admits) a long-standing "option of preemptive actions" (p. 132; NSS, p. 15). Indeed, an idea suggested a number of times in the collection is that any novelty in the Bush II doctrine is merely a difference in degree and scope, not kind; it is the old doctrine with less outsourcing and fewer scruples; the passages that seem to contradict this thesis are usually discussing differences in rhetoric and labeling rather than actual changes in policy. Harry van der Linden's essay takes a different tack by asking whether the rule of preemption could be effectively universalized to all members of the United Nations (though his essay treats "preemptive" and "preventive" attacks as having different meanings, whereas elsewhere in the collection they are often treated as virtually synonymous). D. R. Koukal's essay (discussed in more detail below) looks at both the question of legitimacy and the question of the effectiveness of the "war on terrorism." 

The collection's fourth basic question asks, how does the "war on terrorism" paradigm promote a misunderstanding of many regional conflicts from around the world and thus limit our ability to promote constructive solutions? Focusing on the current political violence in Chechnya, Palestine, Columbia, and Central Asia, several essays analyze how these conflicts have been misunderstood as a result of being reconceptualized within the parameters of the "war on terrorism." Focusing on Chechnya, Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva argues that by understanding these conflicts in terms of the tactics of terrorism, we fail to see that these conflicts are often rooted in a quest for national identity. Such misconceptualization results in the failure to offer constructive solutions. Instead, solutions to these conflicts flowing from the "war on terrorism" involve an artificially imposed alignment which only aggravates the quest for regional or national identity. To make matters worse, as Harry Anastasiou and Robert Gould point out, these conflicts have been conceptualized within an adversarial discourse of competing human rights and competing nationalisms. Not only is a Hobbesian framework a poor foundation for understanding social and political relations, but is, as Wendy C. Hamblet points out, an impediment to envisioning new and constructive solutions rooted in an understanding of social life as grounded in reciprocity and solidarity. An irony that results from this Hobbesianism is that, though current administration under Bush II increasingly packages the "war on terrorism" in the terms of the Second World War, its harsh "us"/"them" binaries generate a rhetoric strikingly reminiscent of Carl Schmitt's well-known "friend"/"enemy" approach, brought to fruition under the Third Reich. 

Finally, the fifth question of the collection asks how philosophical thinking on the ethics of war might help guide us to a more just and sustainable response to global terrorism. The authors typically express a sustained skepticism about both secular and religious justifications for the series of wars of humanitarian intervention following the end of the Cold War. Although these humanitarian interventions are often justified as the liberation of an oppressed people, these wars all too often impose new conditions of dependency on the liberated countries by integrating them into the capitalistic world order. Such liberation and integration are often justified by a doctrine of human rights conceived as timeless moral ideals resulting from the intrinsic value of free individuals pursuing their own self interests at the expense of others. The result is an imposition of a neoliberal world order that is often in conflict with the values of the "liberated peoples." Richard Peterson argues that if any such humanitarian intervention and the inevitable "neo-colonial tutelage" that goes with it can be justified, it must be rooted in a new conception of human rights that moves away from understanding rights as ahistorical, metaphysical, and moral absolutes and toward a shared understanding of minimal standards of moral behavior developed by an open dialogue within a community of nations (p. 379). Peterson envisions the possibility of a "democratic tutelage" supporting a cosmopolitan globalism rooted in a "post colonial reciprocity" (p. 384). The great challenge of our times, both in relation to the "war on terrorism" and the project of conceptualizing a more humane and just global future, lies in moving away from the grounding of moral, political, and economic ideals in self-interested egoism. Although it may be true that our naturally self-interested egoism is inherently violent, the promise of humanity has always been rooted in the possibility of transcendence guided by a sense of justice that inevitably asked us to overcome our natural egoism. Hamblet's concluding essay, for example, argues that human beings can rise above this natural egoism by first recognizing the violence in all of us and becoming open to our own guilt and complicity. In a similar way, Eagan and Mar Peter-Raoul look to ways in which love can serve as both a guiding ideal and living motivator for social justice and prudent policy. 

Which philosophical figures do the authors in the collection turn to most? Some essays draw from a number of thinkers to accomplish their task or are not particularly concerned with utilizing any particular philosopher, whereas others settle in to work with one or two main thinkers. The philosophers or theorists who receive more sustained attention in the collection include Hannah Arendt, Benjamin R. Barber, Hegel, Samuel Huntington, Luce Irigaray, Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Luther King Jr., John Locke, Plato, Samuel Scheffler, and Bernard August Owen Williams. In addition, John David Geib's essay provides a sustained consideration of the pacifist roots of the Christian tradition. Given the cold calculation and promotion of f ear that reigns in so much of the United States' prosecution of its global "war on terrorism," however, one thinker in particular haunts the collection like a ghost--Thomas Hobbes. It is only fitting that Koukal brings this shadow to the surface by devoting his essay to examining the "war on terrorism" through the lens of Hobbes's _Leviathan_ (1651), and argues that the "Leviathanism" of present U.S. policy ultimately cannot succeed. Understandably, one of the texts to which the collection most often turns is not a classic of philosophy, but rather the scripture of the Bush II administration's 2002 NSS document.[5] 

What, then, is our judgment of Presbey's _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism"_? The collection does suffer from some omissions. Since September 11, a number of publications have appeared that bring philosophy to bear on war, terrorism, and the "war on terrorism."[6] Though it is clear that the makeup of Presbey's collection was largely determined by contributions to a conference held by Concerned Philosophers for Peace, it would have been helpful if Presbey had commissioned a survey essay to deal with this growing body of literature; alternatively, she might have prepared an annotated bibliography. On the one hand, though the collection deals with many thinkers, a surprising omission is any sustained discussion of philosopher Giorgio Agamben's writings on the fate of the political subject in an increasingly globalized world--one figure whose thought would have fit especially well in this book on the self-professedly "global" war on terror. Indeed, his early thoughts on the suspension of the law are especially prescient in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and accordingly he has since worked to expand on those ideas. On the other hand, one of Agamben's main sources of inspiration, Arendt, does receive repeated attention, though not in those aspects that Agamben particularly takes up. Likewise, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of the widely discussed book, _Empire_ [2000]) appear in the notes to one essay but do not appear in the index or receive sustained treatment. Some of these absences, however, may have less to do with avoidable oversights and more to do with what might be called the intentionally "practical" orientation of the collection. There are more typos and missing words than one would wish, but no more than one usually encounters now that most publishers have cut back on or almost abandoned the use of copyeditors.
Overall, however, the collection has much to offer. Among its strengths is the lengthy, detailed index, which, though it does have some lacunae, provides the reader with over sixty pages to help navigate the text. In addition, Presbey's own contribution (one of the longer essays in the collection) provides a very useful overview--almost a timeline--of the policy decisions and justifications made during and after the buildup to the war in Iraq, the presumed "heart" of the "war on terrorism." 

A clear message that emerges from these essays is the idea that if we are to continue or recover the guiding message of the Enlightenment--that human culture and social life can be guided toward a more peaceful and humane future by the use of human reason--the skills and dispositions of philosophers are much needed. _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism"_ takes up the task of restoring philosophical reflection as an integral part of public discourse traditionally valued by democratic societies. The essays in this book demonstrate that professional philosophy need not be merely an academic pursuit written for a specialized audience but can demonstrate and model the skills needed for responsible and engaged citizenship. This book helps restore the social and political role of philosophers. The essays here not only model how to ask the right questions, uncover unnoticed assumptions, and expose the contradictions between stated values and actual practices, but also point to alternative understandings of democracy, human rights, and intercultural dialogue. If the themes and ideas articulated in this book can help to shape a public (and not a merely academic) reflection on these issues, this book will accomplish more than being simply a welcome addition to philosophy of peace studies. 

Notes 

[1]. American Council of Trustees and Alumni, _Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It_, http://www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/defciv.pdf24, 2008 via a www.archive.org cache from May 3, 2007). This is a revised version from February 2002; the original was made public on November 11, 2001. 

[2]. For example, in 2004 Education Secretary Rod Paige denounced the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization." See John King, "Paige Calls NEA 'Terrorist Organization,'" _CNN.com_, February 23, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist.nea/ (accessed June 4, 2008). More recently, in 2006, Lurita Alexis Doan, the administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, claimed that the agency's inspector general and his staff were carrying out domestic "terrorism" for attempting to carry out their (accessed May oversight duties. See Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr., "GSA
Chief Seeks to Cut Budget for Audits: Contract Oversight Would Be Reduced," _Washington Post_, December 2, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/> AR2006120101645.html (accessed June 4, 2008). Such declarations are no laughing matter under a de facto suspension of habeas corpus enabled precisely by an appeal to the threat of terrorism. 

[3]. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Stages of Thought," _The New Republic_, May 7, 2008, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e1bd6ffa-> c648-4d40-8efd-40dd1b31b444 (accessed May 24, 2008). 
 [4]. Roger Scruton, "Immanuel Kant and the Iraq War," 
_openDemocracy_, February 19, 2004, http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1749.jsp (accessed June 3, 2008). 

[5]. _The National Security Strategy of the United States of America_, September 17, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html. 
[6]. Numerous books on the topic have appeared, such as inter alia Trudy Govier, _A Delicate Balance: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about Terrorism_ (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002); J. Angelo Corlett,Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis_ (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); and Giovanna Borradori, _Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Examples of special issues of philosophy journals and magazines include _Social Philosophy Today_ 20 (2004), a special issue on "War and Terrorism"; _The Philosophical Forum_ 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005), an issue of "New Essays on War, Peace, and International Ethics"; and _The Philosopher's Magazine_ 34 (2006), which contains a thirty-five-page forum on "Liberty and Security."


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## archade (May 22, 2009)

Gary W. Gallagher. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8078-3206-6.

Reviewed by Brian S. Wills (Kenneth Asbury Professor of History, Department of History and Philosophy, The University of Virginia’s College at Wise)

Published on H-CivWar (April, 2009)

Union is the Lost Cause in Popular Culture

As Americans celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Abraham Lincoln and prepare to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, an understanding of the role popular culture plays in determining the ways in which people will view that powerful period of American history is certainly in order. Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia, has provided Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten as the means by which to offer his insights into the question of “how Hollywood and popular art shape what we know about the Civil War.” In four chapters, the author assesses the Civil War generation’s appraisal of its conflict, the depiction of the South as Confederacy in film, the North’s place in portrayals on the big screen, and the war as seen through the eyes and talents of artists.

Gallagher discusses Civil War culture and art in the context of four distinct traditions: Lost Cause, Union, Emancipation, and Reconciliation. He sees each of these as powerful influences at one time or another on what appeared in artistic renderings. While Gallagher offers context for his various discussions, he focuses by choice on works produced in the last few decades. Interestingly, the examination seems often to be as much a personal journey for the author as a professional one for the historian. Gallagher avers an interest in dissecting the individual works themselves, preferring to understand how they have affected the public’s perceptions of the war specifically and history generally.

Regarding the Union cause that focused on maintaining the integrity of the nation in the face of secession and rebellion, the author notes his surprise at the ability of that theme to sustain its audience through recent years. He rightfully points out that this emphasis was “the most important tradition to the North’s wartime generation” (p. 12). Indeed, it seemed that, in conjunction with Lost Cause advocates, anyone who had drawn a sword or saber wrote a memoir designed to reflect, and not infrequently rewrite, history for the sake of reputation, posterity, and sales to a general audience. Gallagher observes that since those earlier years, the Emancipation and Reconciliation themes that featured the effort to obtain freedom for millions of enslaved persons and sought to emphasize the restoration of harmony to the former enemies, respectively, have subsumed the Union one that prevailed for so long. Throughout the work, he particularly laments that the very cause motivating so many people to take up arms in defense of the nation should take a subordinate role in influencing modern cultural examinations of that conflict.

It is ironic that the success of the Union cause was the source of its own undoing. Once victory on the battlefield had saved the Union and the fate of the Republic itself was no longer in the balance, it was only logical that a shift of emphasis and a reordering of priorities took place. Reconciliation initially became the order of the day, and, not surprisingly, the clarion call of culture, followed much later by a shift to Emancipation as the modern civil rights movement took hold of the popular mind. Of course, in a sense it could actually be considered fortuitous that the Union cause did not require continual reproduction in art and film to demonstrate its strength and authenticate its validity.

The first chapter of Gallagher’s work depicts the American Civil War as seen through the eyes of the generation that witnessed it firsthand. Key to the Lost Cause interpretation was sacrifice and struggle against overwhelming odds and technology. Adherents could hold their heads high with the knowledge that anyone in the same position would have been forced to bow to such insurmountable odds. The fact that many of these Confederate loyalists apparently believed, at one time or another, that the odds could be overcome did not prevent them from later insisting that such was not the case once the war was over. In addition, former Union figures were no less susceptible to hyperbole and contradiction. It would be hard to imagine the circumstances under which either set of antagonists would not want to embrace the values they claimed to cherish, and, at the same time, to denigrate the flaws of their counterpart’s positions. But eventually the old veterans could bring themselves to shake hands across the bloody chasm of their personal histories, and art reflected this emphasis on reconciliation.

In the second chapter, the author bemoans the success of the Confederacy in surviving so well on celluloid when it could not do so in reality. Gallagher correctly underscores the lasting impact of such iconic films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) upon the popular mindset. He asserts that while the Lost Cause influence waned in the wake of these films, it nevertheless remained significant. Finally, he sees Shenandoah (1965) as representing a break from the shackles of the Lost Cause, especially in the film’s portrayal of the chief protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s Charlie Anderson, toward the conflict and his family’s role in it.

Of more recent motion pictures, Gallagher contends that with the notable exception of Gods and Generals (2003), Hollywood has veered away from championing the Lost Cause. Yet in his determination to distance most contemporary filmmakers from the focus on Dixie’s land, he occasionally goes astray. It is more than a quibble, for instance, to insist that Alvarez Kelly (1966), whatever its historical limitations and drawbacks, was no more than one of the myriad “westerns dressed up in ill-fitting Civil War garb” (p. 54). The film had a basis in the Wade Hampton/Thomas Rosser “beefsteak raid,” of September 1864, with Richard Widmark’s “Colonel Tom Rossiter” leading the cattle to Confederate lines.

Likewise, the subsequent explanation of Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled (1971), which was, as the author notes, “dark,” could hardly have been “just as easily” turned into a “dark comedy set anywhere at any time” (p. 55). The film was certainly not like Valkyrie (2008), whose principals insisted at the time of its release that it was a suspense thriller that happened to take place in the Second World War. The flashback scenes of Eastwood as a Union soldier work precisely because they illustrate the hollowness of his claims of victimhood and expose the viewers to a despicable side that his Southern benefactors will discover in time for themselves. The Beguiled employed the elemental themes of deception, betrayal, and hubris, and therefore did not have to be set in the Civil War, but the film functioned in large part because it was.

Gallagher’s third chapter follows the decline of the Union cause in motion picture depictions of the conflict from the Northern perspective. Even so, it could be argued that Reconciliation provided ample support for the Union cause in another form. In the movies, unlike the postwar South for much of its history, re-Union would become the paramount theme. Thus, when John Wayne’s character lamented the continuation of hostilities in a hopeless cause to his Southern counterpart in the opening scenes of The Undefeated (1969) with the observation, “We’re all Americans,” Royal Dano responded with a sentimental tilt of the head, “That’s always been the saddest part of it.” Gallagher may be premature in dismissing the Union cause as an influential part of modern film culture since reunion in victory would mean the reassertion of the nation for such one-time enemies.

If “friends of the Union” appeared “irretrievably to have lost the war on film,” as Gallagher contends, that loss was apparently not uniformly experienced in many of the films he assesses (p. 234). For instance, while Glory (1989) emphasized emancipation and the excellent Pharaoh’s Army (1995) depicted an admittedly pained effort at reconciliation, both provided stories largely from the perspective of individuals fighting for higher national causes, even if they did not always appreciate or comprehend them. In the end, Trip (Denzel Washington) died carrying the national flag up the ramparts of Battery Wagner despite his earlier insistence that he would not do so in Glory, while Captain Abston (Chris Cooper) allowed his vengeance to carry him only so far toward a Southern woman and child before returning to his post in Pharaoh’s Army. Even the Lost Cause elements the author decried in Gods and Generals (2003) seem to have been more the exception than the rule.

The fourth chapter offers a wide-ranging analysis of art relating to the war that amounts, as Gallagher sees it, to a resurgence of the Confederacy, suggested by the sustainability in sales of anything related to Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The historian is correct to point out the frequency with which these subjects are depicted and the almost religious fervor with which some of this material is presented, but he is on less solid ground when he attributes it to a concerted effort on the part of the artists or an indifferent public to enable the Confederate South to live again. Market forces certainly shape what artists, directors, and producers provide for their customers, and history inevitably takes a secondary position to broader and glamorized themes that too frequently distort the record.

The most problematic aspect of this work is Gallagher’s unwillingness to avoid editorializing. Historical interpretation demands assessment, but assessment can be taken into a less helpful sphere as when the author castigates Shelby Foote’s description in the popular Ken Burns television series on the Civil War (1990) of Forrest and Lincoln as “authentic geniuses” who emerged from the conflict. Gallagher can certainly take issue with what he deems “praise for Forrest” that amounts to a “mind-boggling observation” concerning an “unstable warrior,” but he ought to realize that the comment was meant to recognize the innate skills that both men possessed rather than as a favorable, moral comparison between them (p. 242).

Similarly, the fact that Southern veterans are unable to hit Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner), in Dances with Wolves (1990), “(or even his horse),” becomes more of an opportunity to critique these “unimaginably inept riflemen” for their inaccuracy than to view them as the cinematic devices they represented of a soldier who desperately wished to free himself from the civilized world’s woes (p. 55). The Dunbar character must have recognized his opponents’ prowess by attempting to use it to carry out his own suicide. In any case, it is not so much the assessments that the author offers as the tone he frequently employs that distracts the reader and detracts from the analysis.

Popular culture has often been unkind to the historical record, not least to the individuals or events that have not managed to appear prominently in film, in print, or on canvas. Joshua Chamberlain benefited greatly from his time on camera in ways that Gouverneur Warren did not, for example, despite the fact that the latter’s statue still graces that portion of the Gettysburg battlefield in recognition of his role in directing troops to a timely defense of the ground. Likewise, the Round Tops that Warren, Chamberlain, and their Union colleagues defended have emerged as far more critical real estate in the public mind than the bloodied landscape on the opposite end of the Union line in that engagement. Motion picture and art depictions nevertheless have continued to do much to assist George Pickett in maintaining his connection with the famous “charge” on the third day of the battle.

It will be fascinating to see the ways in which art and culture continue to reflect and help to shape the ways “Americans” view one of their most important historical periods. Gallagher has assured that the discussion itself will not be forgotten, whether or not it can ever be won or lost.


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## archade (Jun 23, 2009)

Edward L. Widmer. Ark of the Liberties: America and the World. New York Hill and Wang, 2008. 384 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-2735-4. 

Reviewed by Don H. Doyle (University of South Carolina) 
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Christopher L. Ball 

The Dangers of Idealism 

Edward L. (Ted) Widmer is a historian, a former political speechwriter, and an observer of American politics and foreign policy who is as worried as he is hopeful.[1] He is a gifted writer with a good eye for the apt quote--and a good ear, for many of his most memorable quotes come from oratory. He also has a knack for utilizing obscure, even quirky anecdotes to make his point. For example, he notes that during the U.S. incursion in the Philippines, the Senate debated torture techniques, including a "water cure" whose origins went back to the Spanish Inquisition (p. 155). In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt was the first sitting president to venture outside the United States. Operation Iraqi Freedom was originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation, until someone noticed the acronym. 

In places, especially the discussion of the twentieth century, his interpretation seems partisan in its slant, but not consistently so and not to the point of undermining the author's credibility. He is given at times to soaring prose and loves to quote poetry, often to very good effect. This book, in turns, is inspiring, troubling, and often witty. Scholars of U.S. foreign policy will likely find much of the main story laid out here familiar, but the originality of this book lies in its ambitious scope (from the European discovery to the war in Iraq). The author's bold but not uncomplicated reaffirmation of America's historic mission in the world ought to provokereflection and argument. This a good book for the college classroom, and it will likely find an audience among more readers outside than within the corps of specialists in U.S. foreign relations. 

This is a study of America's national ideals and how they have guided (and misguided) not only America's foreign policymakers but, more fundamentally, the popular understanding of America's role in the world as well. The title comes from Herman Melville's 1850 novel, _White Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War_: "'And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.... We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours'" (pp. xi-xii). 

What may seem a classic instance of national chauvinism was, we learn, part of a lengthy diatribe against flogging in the American navy, a practice Melville condemned as an idiotic, backward custom inherited from the aristocratic British and entirely out of place in a democratic society. It is this juxtaposition of lofty principles and shameful practice that Widmer uses to preview his concept of American idealism and set up a standard against which national failings, as often as achievements, may be measured. It is only the first of many such inconsistencies he acknowledges aboard the good ship of U.S. liberty as he tracks its unpredictable voyage through history. 

The metaphor of the ark performs multiple tasks, most often as a ship at sea rather than a religious totem signifying God's covenant with the nation. The ark as ship is a speechwriter's delight, full of possibilities for references to wandering off course, drifting, or sailing full speed ahead. This nautical symbol also serves Widmer's artful interpretation of American history as a voyage, rarely straight from point to point, often stopping to take on new passengers, always moving. He likes "ark" as a figure of speech for another reason, he reveals, because it suggests _arc-en-ciel_, the French word for rainbow, with its promise that "something wonderful--a pot of gold or simply a new beginning--waits over the next horizon" (p. xiii). Rainbows, readers less disposed toward such sunny expectations may recall, also result from dreadful weather.

Widmer rarely lets his optimism get the better of his task as historian for very long. By his account, the ark of the liberties keeps running aground, drifting, or, worse, launching unwelcome invasions on the shores of other nations. Though he spares none of these mishaps in his log, some readers may be left wondering whether this American ark of the liberties is a righteous vessel veering off course now and then, a _Titanic_ doomed by its own arrogant recklessness to disaster, or some dreadnought battleship portending trouble for the world whenever it leaves port. He quotes Simon Bolívar, who wryly observed: "'The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty'" (p. 83). 

American historians, a British acquaintance once told me, rather than seeing their purpose as providing sardonic witness to human folly, like to think their work will somehow make things better. Widmer exudes American optimism but he is worried; he wants America "to learn from our mistakes and chart a new course" to move toward some more perfect version of our national ideals (p. 315). Accusations of hypocrisy and moral failings are rarely effective without the target espousing high principles against which actual behavior can be assessed. More than most nations, the United States seems to set itself up for poor marks in sincerity and moral consistency by its proclivity for idealistic pronouncements, not only but also--and especially--in its foreign relations. 

Yet this is not the usual scolding book that excoriates leaders and citizens for their failure to live up to the nation's ideals, for Widmer wants to retrieve and restore the ideals themselves, applauding those moments when the nation rises toward its own lofty standards and anguishing when it betrays them. At the opening of the book, he promises to avoid "excessive adulation and criticism" of his subject, but he does so typically by countering one with the other (p. xiv). Throughout the book is a constant back and forth between an inspiring invocation of the national ideal and nagging reminders of its failings. At times, I wondered whether Widmer was straining to curb his enthusiasm for America's promise or keep his despair over current failings in check. 

An opening chapter, aptly named "Fantasy Island," traces the origins of America as an idealized nation back to early European imaginings of the New World as a place where human society might redeem itself. Another chapter on the colonial era is the familiar story of the New England Puritans and early millennial thinking about America as the place God would work out his plan for humans. Though warning us against viewing Jonathan Winthrop's "city upon a hill" as a preview of the future Republic, Widmer stresses the millennialism that would continue to influence America's national creed (p. 29). Perhaps unintentionally, Widmer's exclusive focus on New England illuminates how this region would shape America's nationalist narrative long after it took its secular turn. New England dominates Widmer's telling of the American Revolution as well, but he closes with Thomas Jefferson predicting that his Declaration of Independence would, sooner or later, inspire all peoples to follow the American example. A chapter on "Empire of Liberty" gives the stage over to Jefferson and to foreign relations in the young Republic from the Louisiana Purchase to the Monroe Doctrine. 

Widmer's treatment of the Mexican War is incisive and damning. The first full-scale invasion of a foreign country by the United States (an earlier invasion of Canada in 1812 was quickly defeated) was a radical departure from American national ideals, he explains. Few articulated those ideals more eloquently than John O'Sullivan who coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" and prophesied America's role as the "great nation of futurity." Widmer seems to understand that the concepts underlying O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny" fall very close to his own understanding of America as the ark of the liberties. The ideas were "not entirely bad," he allows; it was their misuse and misapplication to an aggressive war of conquest that he laments (p. 110). The invasion of Iraq is never mentioned here, nor, in the equally cogent passages, is the U.S. incursion in the Philippines, but no one can read these passages without thinking of the American war in Iraq. By the end of the book, we understand how much the recent turns in U.S. foreign policy have informed Widmer's interpretation of the past--and vice versa. 

 Widmer, the historian, wrote the chapters on America and the world through the nineteenth century; Widmer, the political speechwriter and Democratic Party partisan, tends to loom larger in the telling of the rise of America as a world power in the twentieth century. He opens with a spirited interrogation of the dichotomy that has, on one side, Teddy Roosevelt, the "realist," who "vigorously asserted U.S. military might," and, on the other side, Woodrow Wilson, the "idealist," "tortured by naïve aspirations for democracy and reluctant to project the full force of American power" (p. 189). This myth, Widmer argues, laid the foundation for Republican and Democratic party identities ever since, and he wants to set things right by reassessing Wilson as "a visionary who saw things not only as they were, but as they needed to be" (p. 189). 

If Widmer props up Wilson, he positively elevates Franklin D. Roosevelt as a hero not only of America's national ideals but also of the cause of world peace and democracy. In Widmer's rendering, we have in Roosevelt an intellectually inspired and learned president who was imbued with a pervasive sense of America's historic role in spreading democracy and liberty throughout the world. The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stand as testimony to Roosevelt's idealistic vision and also to his capacity to realize ideals. "At long last," Widmer writes with buoyant enthusiasm, "America's capacity to change the world had caught up to her desire. The ark was sailing at full speed" (p. 213). This highly burnished version of Roosevelt is dulled slightly by the admission that he "was not a perfect crusader for freedom," the author conceding as evidence of this imperfection the internment of Japanese Americans, the slow response to Jewish and other refugees from Nazi Germany, and repressive measures against critics (p. 212). 

Two chapters on the Cold War link its Manichean vision of good and evil with deep traditions of America's idealistic vision of itself as the champion of liberty in the world. George Kennan's "Long Telegram" in 1946 and his "Sources of Soviet Conduct" in _Foreign Affairs_ (July 1947) that followed forecast the coming world struggle between Russian Communism and American democracy. Widmer notes similarities between Kennan's article and a Puritan Jeremiad sermon in which Kennan compared the Soviets to "a dangerous rival church with 'mystical, Messianic' tendencies (he disliked its claim to 'infallibility,' a favorite complaint the Puritans had voiced about the Catholic Church).... He even ended his essay with an appeal to Providence and advanced the classic Puritan argument that this moral challenge was welcome, even necessary, if Americans wanted to live up to their potential" (p. 234). So much for Kennan the realist. 

Likewise, Harry Truman's commitment to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation," along with the entire discourse on the "free world," recapitulated centuries of America's self rendering as the beacon of liberty in the world (p. 235). Widmer neatly illustrates the dark side of U.S. Cold War policy in three episodes of intrigue in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Vietnam (1954), each with lasting and disastrous practical results, to say nothing of their violations of the nation's vaunted ideals. 

At this point in the voyage, it seems piloting duties on the ark of the liberties alternate between messianic zealots and sinister, paranoid Captain Queegs. John F. Kennedy comes aboard to rescue the ship with a renewed sense of America's mission: "'We do not imitate--for we are a model to others,'" he proclaimed the night before he took office (p. 269). But Kennedy appears to win points with Widmer for his signs of backing off the Cold War hard line and admitting America cannot impose its will on the world. The spirit of Captain Queeg, in the form of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, took back the helm after Kennedy's untimely death, and America's ark drifted deeper into troubled waters at home and abroad. 

Ronald Reagan is depicted as something of a fool at the helm, albeit one with "an engaging manner, a mellifluous voice, and an unflinching belief in the superiority of American institutions" (p. 291). His references to America as a "shining city upon the hill" might have sent Winthrop (whose 1620 sermon to the Puritans inspired this image) spinning in his grave, but it drew very effectively on deep currents of America's idea of itself as a model for all peoples. Reagan, or rather his speechwriters and handlers, understood how to appeal to that historic idealism of the American people, Widmer concedes, though not without letting us know just how shallow and limited his understanding of those ideals was. While issuing paeans to freedom around the world, Reagan opposed or ignored the civil rights movement and other efforts to expand freedom at home. 

Widmer's allegiance to Bill Clinton's administration reveals itself briefly and modestly. After offering kudos to several unappreciated achievements during the Clinton years, he writes: " As a minor participant in the Clinton administration, I realize that my perspective is hardly objective. But still, it seemed at the time--and it still seems, a decade later--as if the best of U.S. foreign policy was working and the worst was held in check" (p. 308). 

In the epilogue, however, Widmer takes off his gloves and sets forth a withering assessment of just how far the United States has fallen since George W. Bush took office. "This is not a book about the Bush administration," he writes in the epilogue, but by this point it seems much of this story of America's engagement with the world is informed by recent events. "It is worth pausing for a moment," he continues, "to contemplate how a group of patriotic leaders could have inflicted so much harm, so quickly, on the world order that had been created by their own country" (p. 317). 

Though couched in the language of America's traditional idealism as the ark of the liberties, Bush's incursion in Iraq, by Widmer's account, is a terrible betrayal of that idealism. Those who led America into the Iraq war, he argues, were the opposite of naïve idealists; they were _cynics_ who exploited America's tradition of idealism: "what does one call an effort to spread democracy by people who do not seem to believe in the basic consensus of democracy? What does one call airy theories of perfect human behavior floated by people with no inclination to utopia? What does one call the interventionist yearnings of people who have shown very little interest in foreign cultures?" These were nothing more than "wolves in Wilsonian clothing" (p. 321). 

 Widmer tells us in closing that "we Americans are at their best, and our most truly world-shaping, when we reject the idea of special destiny and simply get to work" (p. 328). Many readers of this book may feel less inspired to set sail on voyages reshaping the world in our image and more inclined to head for port and get to work repairing their own ship. 

Note 

[1]. Widmer previously authored _Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and coauthored with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. a biography of Martin Van Buren, _Martin Van Buren_ (New York: Times Books, 2005). He also edited two collections on American political oratory for the Modern American Library. Currently, he serves as the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and before that served as speechwriter and foreign policy advisor for President Bill Clinton.


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## archade (Jun 23, 2009)

Donna Alvah. Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965. New York New York University Press, 2007. xi + 291 pp, ISBN  978-0-8147-0501-8. 

Reviewed by Heather M. Stur (University of Southern Mississippi) Published on H-Minerva (April, 2009) Commissioned by Kara Dixon Vuic 

Families, Friendship, and Foreign Policy during the Cold War 

As the United States expanded its military presence throughout the world in the early years of the Cold War, Defense Department officials granted permission for families to join personnel stationed overseas. The policy had its roots in the immediate aftermath of World War II and concerns about the morale of war-weary troops. The idea was that sending wives and children abroad would lessen the strain on servicemen called to participate in postwar rebuilding and security efforts. Thus began a fascinating chapter in the history of U.S. foreign relations that, as Donna Alvah explains, reveals the intimate side of U.S. overseas interventions during the Cold War. 

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe before becoming Army Chief of Staff, understood the emotional difficulties of prolonged separation from family. Writing to General George Marshall while stationed in Germany, Eisenhower confessed that "'I just plain miss my family,'" and he arranged for his son, John, who served in the First Division in Europe, to remain in Germany rather than be transferred to the Pacific (p. 24). Eisenhower also noted the strain separation had on his wife, Mamie. However, he refrained from requesting permission for Mamie to join him in Europe out of concern that such a move might draw public ire since it was not general army policy. Ultimately, though, the army began allowing families to join personnel overseas in February 1946. 

What began as a troop morale building effort soon became a foreign policy initiative. Defense Department personnel deemed service wives and children "unofficial ambassadors" who would represent the goodwill of U.S. intervention. They wielded the "soft power" that U.S. policymakers hoped would ease the minds of peoples alarmed by American military and political incursions. By working in orphanages, raising money for impoverished mothers, and attempting to establish common ground between American and local cultures, service wives helped foster ties between the United States and its allies. Indeed, some service wives considered their work a means of furthering the goals of U.S. international relations, and they 
demonstrated the belief held by many Americans that U.S. intervention was noble and beneficent. In the early Cold War, U.S. foreign policy was a two-pronged endeavor of friendship building and nation building, and humanitarian efforts conducted by service wives demonstrated a maternalism that worked in tandem with the paternalism of U.S. military intervention. Yet, like paternalism, the motherly concern of service wives was predicated on notions of American cultural superiority, which became especially apparent when race was a factor. Alvah uses Americans' encounters with Okinawans to highlight the role race played in shaping paternalistic relationships between the United States and certain allies. While Americans found commonalities with Germans in Christianity and whiteness, they cast Okinawans as childlike and in need of American guidance. These attitudes were not lost on Okinawans, many of whom came to resent 


U.S. intervention. 

Drawing on a diverse set of sources, including military documents, U.S. census data, memoirs, magazines, newspapers, and Defense Department records, Alvah's book makes three important contributions to the scholarly literature on the history of U.S. Cold War foreign relations. First, it reveals an American aspect of what historian Ann Laura Stoler calls the intimate side of imperialism. Day-to-day personal interactions between foreigners and locals expressed power relationships just as demonstrations of military might did. Although the United States in the Cold War did not practice nineteenth-century European-style colonialism, its foreign policy aimed to build democracies of its own likeness, and, as Alvah illustrates, interactions between service wives and local populations were fraught with the tension between goodwill efforts and a sense of cultural dominance. Second, the book shows how Cold War-era family and gender constructions were deployed as part of U.S. foreign relations. Scholars, such as Elaine Tyler May, have explored the ways in which Cold War imperatives shaped the image of the nuclear family, but Alvah demonstrates how families became vehicles of foreign policy. Third, Alvah's book contributes to the relatively new process of incorporating women into the U.S. Cold War foreign relations narrative. Not only does the book bring women's voices into the story, but it also illustrates how constructions of femininity were key parts of U.S. overseas interventions. Alvah's work both builds on previous scholarship and broadens the historiography. 

Criticisms of the book are minor. The subtitle suggests that the monograph examines the experiences of military families, but American service wives receive the most attention by far. Alvah covers children in one chapter, and she states up front that wives, not husbands, are the focus of her inquiry, because during the Cold War the majority of U.S. military personnel were men. However, a deeper examination of masculinity and its uses in military endeavors would have bolstered Alvah's argument that both maternalism and paternalism informed U.S. Cold War foreign policy. Overall, though, Alvah's work is a necessary read for scholars of U.S. foreign relations and a useful addition to graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in diplomatic history.


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## archade (Jun 23, 2009)

George Gavrilis. The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries. New York Cambridge University Press, 2008. 216 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-89899-7. 

 Reviewed by John Agnew (University of California, Los Angeles) Published on H-Diplo (March, 2009) Commissioned by Christopher L. Ball 

Hands across Borders 

Arguably, "state strength" has become the leitmotif of much writing about contemporary statehood with considerable attention given to detailing why some states succeed and others fail because of the relative adequacy or "strength" of their central state apparatus (p. 2). In his thought-provoking book about the management of interstate borders, George Gavrilis will have none of this. He uses border management and control to offer a different and distinctive understanding of state authority. 

Gavrilis begins by noting how ineffective most states are at managing their borders. He goes on to examine in considerable empirical detail his theoretical position that border management is a function of state "preferences" rather than "capacity" (as in the conventional wisdom), domestic politics is the best predictor of such preferences, and the nature of the border "regime" determines the effectiveness of management (p.4). Most of his empirical analysis is devoted to establishing that cooperative border strategies with devolution of control to the local level are best at producing secure borders. The other parts of the argument are largely inferred from this rather than demonstrated separately. 

Views of the book by political scientists concerned with questions of domestic politics versus international context and state preferences versus state capacities will depend on how well Gavrilis is judged to have made the connections. I think that this may well be the Achilles' heel of the book. From the perspective of those of us more interested in borders simply as instruments of state building, however, it is the typology of border management strategies and the innovative empirical studies undertaken to investigate them that stands out as the main accomplishment of the book. In this regard, Gavrilis has produced a first-rate monograph that will be widely read and stimulative of other research on border management. 

 The book is divided into seven chapters moving from a general outline of the central theoretical conundrum of border management, that those which are least policed through central fiat are the most successfully managed, and theoretical claims about how borders are illustrative of various facets of state formation, to detailed studies of the nineteenth-century Greek-Ottoman border in what is today central Greece and contemporary border management in Central Asia. The fundamental premise of the study is that borders are institutions and are shared with neighboring states. This leads to the central claim that "borders are local manifestations of the claims of a state's authority" (p. 6). A typology of border control strategies is used to lay out how from the outset "new states" adopt one of four approaches which reflect the nature of domestic politics within the state at that time. The four approaches are boundary regimes (involving local cross-border cooperation between guards), unilateral policing, conflictual unilateral policing, and ad hoc strategies. Following in the theoretical footsteps of Elinor Ostrom, Charles Tilly, and Roger Gould, Gavrilis focuses on how locally negotiated cross-border cooperation through shared communication and monitoring capacity rather than rent-seeking and corruption determines the course of state formation. The state's ability to let its local agents make their decisions unmonitored from the center is seen as crucial to securing borders and thus enhancing state formation. Successful states and secure borders are established from outside-in rather than vice versa. Gavrilis uses the case studies to empirically bolster his general argument. 

Gavrilis relies on a mix of Greek and Ottoman archival sources to show how the border between the two sides was policed from the 1830s until the 1870s. He shows quite convincingly that there was considerable cross-border collaboration, particularly in the central more highland area before 1856. He interprets this as suggesting how much both governments converged in their approach to state-building by resisting centralized micromanagement of the border. As he notes, however, the longstanding system of provincial rule within the Ottoman Empire (of which Greece was, of course, also recently a part) encouraged such local collaborative policing. Many border guards on both sides were also former bandits whose local knowledge, multilingualism, and common norms worked to favor collaboration. Over time, and from the Greek side in particular, the policing became increasingly unilateral with negative consequences for both border management and relations between the two states. Great Powers, particularly Britain, are also invoked as having some role in resolving episodic disputes but they are downplayed theoretically in a resolutely domestic-focused explanation for why border strategies take the form they do. Whether the case study has much to say in such different circumstances as those that prevail, say in Africa or in Latin America, is clearly open to question. 

The Central Asian case study relies more on ingenious and time-consuming fieldwork than archives, including the close observation of various border crossings between the various republics since their independence from the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Again, the theoretical thrust is that prior to interaction with other states, their governments established preferences for how they would manage their borders, thus illustrating their approach to state formation. In Central Asia, if Uzbekistan has the most state-controlled economy and has the most centrally controlled borders, Kyrgyzstan stands at the other extreme with the most liberal border regime oriented to demarcation more than control. Gavrilis does not investigate why this should have happened this way and for these particular states. All of the states were, until recently, Soviet republics. One might have expected greater uniformity after independence in border management practices than appears to be the case. Rather, Gavrilis assumes that they reflect the preferences of the respective political elites. He resists the idea that ethnic or nationalist politics or external influences have anything to do with it. 

The most important contribution of this book is to make a simple point, albeit one that is frequently missed in border studies: that border security depends on institutional design (particularly that which encourages local cross-border collaborative policing) than on such vacuities as a state's capacity or strength, usually measured in terms of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and military spending. The problem with the book is that it tries to do much more than this in suggesting how elite preferences (which seemingly arearbitrary constructs) determine the character of institutional design and strongly dismisses the wider international context as having much if any role. In these respects I find it overstated and unconvincing. Yet, its counterintuitive claim that a state which "delegates and surrenders authority to its boundary administrators has a better chance of achieving a secure border" is given substantial support, particularly from the Central Asian case study (p. 2). This is in itself an important achievement. It is one that enthusiasts for ever tighter, centralized, and unilateral border controls in the United States and elsewhere need to reflect on before they realize the exact opposite of what they intend.


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## Centermass (Jun 23, 2009)

Thank you Archade. Your posts are illuminating and informative. Keep em coming.


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## archade (Jul 2, 2009)

All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Army Special Operations Forces in Iraq by Charles H. Briscoe et al. USASOC History Office (http://www.gpo.gov), Fort Bragg, North Carolina 28307, 2006, 517 pages, 

Written by people involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom, All Roads Lead to Baghdad is an eye-opening account of that operation, including the occupation of Iraq. The staff of the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) History Office has composed a superb picture of this war and its aftermath.

The book relates the importance and effect of special forces in Iraq through the eyes of the soldiers involved, from planners and generals to operatives in various special-forces teams. Despite the subtitle, the study deals not only with USASOC but also with many of the conventional operations during the war, including deployments and the history of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. USASOC also provides a wide variety of information, much of it conveyed by charts, graphs, and maps, as well as firsthand accounts of soldiers and airmen.

The first chapter, one of the book’s most valuable sections, explains the importance of Iraq to the Middle East and the United States. Many Americans still have false perceptions of the state of Iraq before coalition forces invaded in 2003. It describes Saddam and his regime as “not a toothless lion” (p. 6), explaining that he could call on 400,000 regular forces and twice that number of reservists. The author also discusses Saddam’s fedayeen and the capabilities of these fanatically dedicated brigades. This discussion includes diagrams of the Iraqi order of battle prior to Iraqi Freedom. I was surprised to see that, at that time, Iraq boasted 325 combat aircraft. Only 20 of them remain operational today.

Another section of the book that I found fascinating addresses the employment of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-North and the trouble experienced by coalition special forces because of Turkey’s refusal to allow their deployment during Iraqi Freedom. This impasse led to the creation of Operation Ugly Baby, a flight path so ugly “only a mother could love it” (p. 117). The war would have proceeded much more quickly with Turkey’s support.

Written chronologically, the study covers details down to the hour when the planning stage began and provides a “five-month snapshot” of Iraqi Freedom (p. 451). Some portions seem repetitive, however, and several times the authors’ clear recounting of operations makes the summaries unnecessary.

All Roads Lead to Baghdad gives readers a chance to see Iraqi Freedom through the eyes of the people who fight on and behind the front lines. It also allows them to understand how special forces of all branches affect the outcome of major operations. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has any interest in special operations and Iraq.

Cadet Jake A. Dugat, USAF
Air Force ROTC, University of Houston


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## archade (Jul 6, 2009)

Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres 
of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge Cambridge University 
Press, 2006. xii + 202 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-85799-4.

Reviewed by Yannick Cormier (Université de Montréal)

The Unknown Massacres: Black French Prisoners in 1940

Historically speaking, the Holocaust, and the Nazi mass exterminations and atrocities committed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945 have always received more attention than other crimes that took place during the Second World War. For instance, a long-forgotten fact was the various massacres of African French war prisoners during the German invasion of France in May and June 1940, when German soldiers randomly executed black Tirailleurs Sénégalais. Raffael Scheck, professor of modern history at Colby College, recently wrote on this in _Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940_. This book presents an interesting account of these events, and provides a fair analysis of the causes and motivations of the perpetrators.In four detailed chapters, Scheck presents an overview of the massacres of black French Colonial Troops, the number of victims(1,500 to 3,000), as well as the military events that led to them. In order to illuminate the motivations that led the German invaders randomly to murder so many black war prisoners, chapters 2 and 3 give an overall analysis of a problematic that seemed unanswerable in this particular case: why did this happen? Chapter 4 takes a look at the implications of such events, and it integrates those atrocities into the gradual barbarization process of the German Wehrmacht that took place between 1939 and 1945. 

In 1940, the French army included more than 100,000 black French soldiers from France's African colonies, mainly Senegal, Mauritania,and Niger. More than 75,000 of them served in France before and during the German invasion; the rest of them served guard duty in the various colonies. As the Wehrmacht panzer divisions swept across France in May-June 1940, some of those black French soldiers (about 40,000 of them), mainly organized in black regiments or mixed units, were engaged in fierce combat against German soldiers. About 10,000 black soldiers were killed, some wounded, and others taken prisoner during the French debacle. Scheck states that between 1,500 to 3,000 black French prisoners of war were massacred throughout the campaign, either during or after combat. Generally speaking, _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ were treated differently from other war prisoners by the victorious army. The existence of a well-implanted anti-black racism and stereotypes among the German soldiers frequently resulted in the black French troops being separated from other prisoners of war. Fear of _coupes-coupes_ (a hand-to-hand weapon used by the _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ that German soldiers considered a treacherous weapon), latent desire for revenge because of German losses, or simple racism, resulted in random massacres of black French war prisoners by members of the Wehrmacht. 

The author's investigation of what caused the slaughters is also interesting. Scheck gives a precise account of those situational factors and links them well to ideological ones, stating that racist Nazi indoctrination and stereotypes must be fully integrated into the chaotic context of fighting in order to explain the massacres. He remarks that there were no clear governmental or military orders authorizing such criminal behavior toward specific groups of prisoners of war in 1940. In fact, many of those atrocities were committed by heavily indoctrinated elite Wehrmacht,or Nazi military units like the SS Totenkopf, or the _Gross Deutschland._ Those troops were already (or would be, along with others, later on) held responsible for racist behavior and excesses, as well as mass murders during May-June 1940. Scheck avoids overall generalization on what happened to those prisoners by discussing the random character and inconsistency of the massacres. Readers quickly understand that not 
all black French war prisoners were executed, and that some German or French officers even managed to prevent such events from occurring. In fact, the treatment of imprisoned black French soldiers actually improved after the May-June 1940 campaign, especially in prisoner of war camps. 

By linking such events to the absence of guidelines issued by the German army on the treatment of black war prisoners, as well as with situational factors, the author brilliantly integrates the singularity of such atrocities in a concept of an informal "race war"waged by theWehrmachtduring that specific event. First observed in Poland after September 1939, and culminating with Barbarossa and the Holocaust later on, this "race war"was part of a gradual process of barbarization and nazification of the German army that took place throughout the conflict. By differentiating the two types of warfare conducted by the German army in the West and in the East, Scheck smoothly integrates the massacres of those prisoners into the larger context of Nazi crimes, thus giving us anything but a short-lived historical interpretation of the behavior of German soldiers during the May-June 1940 campaign. In fact, the author successfully integrates the concept of Nazi racist warfare in the German western 
campaign, an idea that typically has not been assessed by traditional military history. He thus proposes an interesting, and new interpretation of German warfare excesses during World War II. 

Scheck's overall assessment of the construction of anti-black prejudices and stereotypes in Germany with linkage to the May-June 1940 massacres is precise and well contextualized; he understood exactly how to integrate this long-existing racism into the events'causes. Wanting to assess the evolution of racist behavior in Germany, the author goes back to the early 1900s, namely to the time of Wilhelmian German colonialism in West Africa, providing context for the development of racist behavior toward black Africans. According to Scheck, important German anti-black racial stereotypes were linked to the use of _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ in the French army during World War I, and of black French soldiers in the Rhineland in the 1920s. In his view, racism was wellintegrated in Germany before and during the Third Reich, and had been frequently employed by Nazi propaganda after the outbreak of the Second World War.Thus, it explains the May-June 1940 massacres. 

Even though the author cites some important sources for assessing the German behavior that led to such atrocities, the analysis of the motivations and psychology of the Wehrmacht and SS perpetrators could have gone deeper. Despite a contextualization of a "Kelman and Hamilton"model (p. 6), which suggests psychological patterns of authorization-routinization-dehumanization leading to massacres, this particular approach still presents some methodological limits, especially on questions of whether authorization and dehumanization allowed such atrocities in the World War II context. The methodologies used to assess the sociology and psychology of perpetrators could have been broadened to include specialized literature on the behavior of Nazis orWehrmacht members. This would have offered an even better analysis of the situation. As well, more emphasis could have been put on the memory of those slaughters. Although it would have been difficult research to accomplish, the memory of survivors would have been an interesting theme to investigate. 

Despite this criticism, Raffael Scheck offers us a valuable piece of historiography. This book is, and will remain, an impressive investigation into French and German archival records. In fact, it is difficult to criticize such a well-written example of proficient historical work. Scheck's book stands as a major reference for the 
historian interested in the events related to those massacres, as well as an interesting exploration of the ideology and mentality of the German Wehrmachtduring the French campaign of May-June 1940. The integration, and comparative analysis of those atrocities in the broader context of Nazi warfare methods is remarkable, and should be read by any scholar of Nazi war crimes or of World War II. In fact, this new evaluation of theWehrmachtand Nazi behavior is also a valuable contribution to the history of blacks and Nazi Germany.


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## archade (Jul 8, 2009)

Boris Gorbachevsky. Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945. Edited and translated by Stuart Britton. With foreword by David M. Glantz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xix + 453 pp., ISBN 978-0-7006-1605-3. 

Reviewed by Stephen G. Fritz (Department of History, East Tennessee State University)




A Forgotten Soviet Soldier 

Over sixty years after the end of World War II, western readers still search for the reality of Ivan, the average Red Army soldier. GI Joe, Tommy, and Jerry have all become familiar to us through a wealth of memoirs, published diaries, and collections of letters, as well as numerous scholarly studies. Ivan, though, remains elusive. The Red Army in our minds is as much based on literary metaphors as on any evidentiary basis: a dull mass of stolid, brown-clad soldiers rising out of the endless steppe of southern Russia; an army of mute peasants stoically enduring appalling hardships and brutalities; the "red horde" of Nazi propaganda bearing down on "civilized" Europe. With the collapse of communism, however, not only have historians published studies based on sources in previously closed archives, but memoirs of Soviet soldiers, until now inaccessible, have begun to appear in translation in the West as well. Boris Gorbachevsky's memoir is thus not groundbreaking in the sense that it reveals any startlingly new revelations, nor does it grip the reader with detailed, harrowing tales of combat. Although Gorbachevsky served as frontline infantry soldier and officer for three years, his memoir provides surprisingly little in the way of graphic descriptions of battle. It does include a valuable account of the fighting around Rzhev, one of the lesser-known, although still appallingly bloody, meat grinders of the eastern front, but this episode is not what gives his memoir its power. Rather, it is his relentless search for the truth of the war, for the reality of the system for which Ivan ostensibly fought but which treated him with callous disregard both during and after the war, for an understanding of the fear, hatred, and desire for revenge that dominated soldiers' lives for these horrible years that motivates Gorbachevsky. With its recreated dialogue and snapshot descriptions of life at the front, Through the Maelstrom is an almost Chekhovian chronicle of individuals caught in the grip of the ultimate inhumanity.

Gorbachevsky exemplifies well the contradictions and complexities of Soviet life: he was the Jewish son of a provincial Communist Party official in Ukraine and his wife, who had herself taken part in the revolution and civil war. His father, arrested in 1937 at the height of the purge, survived the gulag to return to local administration during the war. The young Boris, a Komsomol member who also joined the party, was thrown into war while still in his teens; as a front soldier, junior officer, and regimental Komsomol organizer, he remained skeptical of the politruks (political officers) at the front; he worked for forty years a professor, journalist, and editor in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the United States in 1994; and, like many others, he was proud of his accomplishments in helping to defeat Nazism, but troubled by the nature of the Stalinist system and its failure to create a better postwar life. His was, he claims, a lifelong quest to answer a question that had no simple answer: Why did the cost of victory turn out to be so unimaginably high?

In most respects, Gorbachevsky's story confirms other recent accounts of life in the Red Army. Working as an apprentice in a metalworking factory, the young Gorbachevsky was suddenly dispatched at the end of 1941 as a cadet to infantry school, where he was exposed to the usual petty harassment and harsh training. More troubling was the fact that, as would-be officers, he and his fellow cadets were forced to study field tactics and regulations that both they and their instructors knew were not merely outdated but suicidal. Worst of all, though, were the political classes, with their endless lectures and recitations of the speeches and orders of Comrade Stalin. The terror-inspiring specter of the Red Tsar, indeed, was never far removed from the minds of the men destined to be sent to slaughter at the front. Relentless political indoctrination and efforts to secure informants among the men, constant reminders of the impact of collectivization and the purges, and pervasive fear and suspicion that stifled initiative all left their mark on the Red Army. Some creeping appeals to nationalism were made, although they were mingled with a distinct political message, but most of his comrades seemed largely indifferent to both. More troubling, Gorbachevsky also notes a pervasive antisemitism in the Red Army, a theme that recurs throughout the book.

Their time at the infantry school cut short by the demands of war, the half-trained cadets in May 1942 were sent on a seemingly endless journey through the vast expanse of Russia. Their destination would be Rzhev, to the northwest of Moscow, a place not as well known as some other sites of the war, but just as bloody. Poorly fed and equipped, given indifferent combat training just behind the front, and still forced to endure endless political indoctrination, Gorbachevsky's unit was finally thrown into battle in late August. His baptism by fire evoked the usual emotions of fear, hatred, exhilaration, confusion, and frenzy, but what troubled him the most were the obviously senseless charges into the stout German defenses, the profligacy with which Red Army soldiers were squandered, the piles of dead littering the ground, and the seeming unconcern of higher Soviet commanders for their troops. Rzhev marked Gorbachevsky for life, but not just because of the trauma of battle. His honesty forces him to admit that he and his mates were fearful of two things: being taken prisoner by the Germans, and the osobisty, the agents of the Red Army Special Department. Stalin's famous Order No. 227 ("Not One Step Back"), issued in late July 1942, had intensified the already harsh, punitive measures common at the front, where the severest punishments were meted out on a whim or for the merest suspicion of disloyalty. Now a new terror confronted the men: fear of the penal battalions, the deadly, soul-destroying punishment units in which over four hundred thousand soldiers served a virtual death sentence. The reader can feel the turmoil, the confusion of emotions, and the mixed feelings that gripped Gorbachevsky and other front soldiers: many clearly hated Stalin and his brutal regime, but German atrocities, the evidence of which lay all around, drove them to fight.

Life, as the Red Army soldier quickly came to understand, was cheap at the front. With the costly failure of the Soviets to break German resistance at Rzhev, the front during the winter of 1942-43 settled into a dreary trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. As men in the ranks increasingly despaired at the huge losses and the distant prospect of victory, they sought escape in other ways. Gorbachevsky, wounded in the late-summer fighting, had already been stunned by the high incidence of self-inflicted wounds being treated in the field hospitals. Now, back at the front and a company commander, he had to confront another dilemma: the shockingly high rate of desertion and the savage measures taken against front officers to stop it. In one of the most interesting chapters in the book, Gorbachevsky details the assiduous German efforts to entice Soviet soldiers to desert, and the astonishing number who did just that, some five hundred thousand in 1942 alone. A combination of better food and living conditions trumpeted by the Germans with severe morale problems on the Soviet side fueled the nightly forays across no-man's-land. For Soviet front officers, though, these desertions were more than just a drain on manpower, since the Red Army sought to stem the flow by imposing draconian punishments on them, including sentences to penal battalions and prison camps. Political officers also stepped up their indoctrination efforts, but faced the unremitting hostility of peasant soldiers toward the regime in the wake of the collectivization measures sponsored by the party in the 1930s. Interestingly, although he mentions efforts to build bonds between men and officers, the notion of camaraderie as a primal force binding front soldiers together is conspicuously absent from Gorbachevsky's account, especially in comparison with German memoirs. Despite his efforts, even Gorbachevsky cannot overcome the deep suspicion that Ivan has for his officers: Stalinist terror and oppression have insured a nearly unbridgeable gulf. Two things, not necessarily independent of each other, eventually began to stanch the flow of desertions: front propaganda increasingly substituted "fatherland" for "party," and a string of Soviet victories touched off by the great triumph at Stalingrad finally persuaded men in the front ranks that they might yet win the war for Russia, not Stalin. Still, as Gorbachevsky notes, in 1943 the triumphs at Rzhev and in Belorussia came largely as a result of the application of brute force, with the front troops paying an awful price.

The combination of continuing sacrifices on the part of the average soldiers and the increasing prospect of victory now raised a frightening prospect to Stalin. According to Gorbachevsky, a new spirit, a new mood, and a new sense of freedom (if that term is not an oxymoron when used in conjunction with Stalin's Russia) now infused the front ranks. War was changing attitudes, as among themselves front soldiers increasingly expressed the expectation that they would return to a freer and more democratic society and that they would be rewarded for their sacrifices and hardships with a better way of life. Ominously for the future, though, fear of the osobisty and the influence of the political officers hardly abated. As the Red Army surged westward into Germany, the danger, from Stalin's point of view, grew ever greater, as peasant soldiers began to see how things might be different and better. Red soldiers, amazed at the wealth of their enemy, struggled to understand why Adolf Hitler had coveted Soviet territory. "Now tell us, Captain," one inquired of Gorbachevsky, "why did the stinking German come crawling into Russia with war, especially when his pigs live better than our peasants? It makes a man furious to see the wealthy way they live" (p. 374). Gorbachevsky tried to convince his men that the German people were not responsible for Hitler's crimes, but they knew better, having seen evidence of German atrocities spread over countless villages and hundreds of miles.

These two emotions, resentment and revenge, were now mingled in an explosive brew. As Soviet troops scrambled to send packages filled with German goods home, plundering everything in their path, they also began exacting an understandable, if no less brutal, vengeance. Was this retribution fanned deliberately by Stalin to distract Soviet troops from their troublesome questions? The answer from the front, as Gorbachevsky notes, is inconclusive. Even as orders were issued urging officers to restrain their men, Soviet propaganda continued to blare a message of hate, as best summarized by Ilya Ehrenburg's famous injunction to Red Army soldiers to "Kill the German! Kill the German! That is your mother's request. Kill the German!... Nothing will bring you so much joy as a German corpse" (pp. 361-362). And Red troops did just that, as well as engage in an orgy of rape, even as German soldiers fought savagely and continued to inflict astonishingly high casualties on the Russians. Not until mid-April, though, when it was apparent that the actions of Soviet troops were alienating the German population and endangering any sort of good relations, did Stalin finally act definitively to stop the violence. The bitterness of the last weeks and months of fighting, perhaps, ensured frosty relations between conquerors and conquered, but Germans themselves, their attitude marked by fear, hostility, and a stubborn unwillingness to see Soviet soldiers as anything but backward and primitive, evinced little willingness to cooperate. Too much had happened and Gorbachevsky's efforts as a local town commander to promote even minimal interaction largely failed although, ironically, he, a Soviet Jew, had a brief fling with a young German woman. Nor, in retrospect, would his efforts have amounted to much, even had they succeeded, since by mid-August the German population of Lower Silesia was expelled to make way for Poles. The era of border alterations and great migrations was well underway by the time Gorbachevsky and his men left, in American Studebaker trucks, for Hungary.

Gorbachevsky ends his memoirs with a short, bitter reflection on the meat grinder at Rzhev, a fitting conclusion, since this bloody battle, more than any other experience, marked the beginning of his lifelong quest for understanding. Professional historians will perhaps be troubled somewhat by the lack of any documentary evidence for Gorbachevsky's accounts. He evidently kept no diaries or journals, or made use of any letters; instead, he recreated his story from memory, a claim that will be amazing to some, especially given the detailed dialogue among soldiers recounted in the book. Given the furor over the veracity of Guy Sajer's autobiography, The Forgotten Soldier (1976), despite the fact that Sajer had filled numerous journals shortly after the war, the reaction to Through the Maelstrom should prove interesting. Like Sajer's work, it is also a compelling account that rings with authenticity, even if it does lack the comfort of citations. More importantly, Gorbachevsky reminds us that the Soviet soldier was not just an abstraction, part of the brown mass. Rather, he was an individual acted upon by the great forces of history, who also sought to influence his situation, whether through escape or by meting out revenge to his tormentors. Ivan, at bottom, was a human being just like all others, subject to despair, confusion, hope, anger, fear, and the desire for something in which to believe. In the end, Gorbachevsky suggests, all he and other soldiers can do is attempt to cut through the myth and cliches and give an honest account of what happened. This he has done in admirable fashion.


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## archade (Jul 8, 2009)

Jay A. Stout. Slaughter at Goliad: The Mexican Massacre of 400 Texas Volunteers. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008. xv + 242 pp. Illustrations., ISBN 978-1-59114-843-2. 

Reviewed by Richard Bruce Winders (The Alamo)


An Introduction to the Goliad Massacre 

Many people know about the Alamo, even though their knowledge about the famous 1836 battle and its significance may be hazy.  But who knows about Goliad, an event which followed closely on the heels of the Texan defeat in San Antonio, and which actually produced more Texan casualties? Jay A. Stout contends that the answer is virtually nobody.  In his latest work, Slaughter at Goliad, the author promises to bring forth "the most comprehensive treatment yet on the slaughter at Goliad" (p. xii).  Thus, the purpose of his book is to shine light on the events that occurred in March 1836 around the old Mexican town of Goliad, and the Presidio La Bahía. 

Goliad has always been the poor step-sister to the Alamo.  Both were military disasters brought on by the inability of the leaders of the Provisional Government of Texas to set aside their personal grievances in order to devise an effective defense against the approaching armies of Mexico.  Throughout the fall of 1835, the Texan victories resulted in the capture of the strategic settlements of San Antonio and Goliad.  As factions within the Provisional Government bickered over what to do next, General Antonio López de Santa Anna showed no irresolution, but led his army back into Texas.

Two columns marched into Texas.  The largest was led by Santa Anna himself, and destined for San Antonio.  The second smaller one was commanded by General José Urrea, and it advanced on Goliad.   The key to understanding why these settlements were so important to both the Mexicans and the Texans is the knowledge that both were population centers, military outposts, centers of commerce, and crossroads laying astride the two major roads that traversed Texas.  The rebels and government forces did not just happen upon these places; they were drawn there by the dictates of war.  Strategic locations have to be controlled.

The Texas Revolution, the setting for the story of Goliad, should be viewed as a reflection of Jacksonian American.  Rampant egalitarianism made it difficult for the Texans to follow orders.  Samuel Houston, appointed commanding general by the Provisional Government, was told that he could not exercise any authority over the volunteers in the field because they had already elected their own leaders.  At the head of an almost nonexistent Texas regular army, Houston could merely suggest a course of action while he issued commissions and waited for his newly appointed officers to recruit their companies.  Two men who received commissions were William B. Travis (Lieutenant Colonel of Texas Cavalry) and James W. Fannin (Lieutenant. Colonel of Texas Artillery).  Respectively, these men--the first a lawyer and the second a struggling planter--were fated to be the commanders at the Alamo and Goliad.  Their commissioning is indicative of the common belief at the time that every American was a natural born soldier, and that no special training was required to lead citizen-soldiers.  As in government, commanding volunteers in antebellum America required the consent of the governed. 

James W. Fannin has come off poorly in the history of the Texas Revolution, an assessment that Stout supports.  The illegitimate son of a Georgia planter, Fannin struggled to find his place in life.  A brief and unsuccessful period of study at the U.S. Military Academy gave him a claim to military prowess that he did not possess.  Like many of his compatriots, Texas offered him the opportunity to reinvent himself.  Once the revolution erupted, Fannin (with his quasi West Point credentials) emerged as a community leader capable of mobilizing volunteers, something his elevation to such a high rank acknowledged.  As lieutenant colonel of the 1st Regiment of Texas Artillery, Fannin was third in command of the regular army, after Houston and Lieutenant Colonel James C. Neill, the post commander at San Antonio. 

Fannin quickly became involved in the contentious split that developed in the Provisional Government of Texas.  He sided with the General Counsel, which stood in opposition to Houston and Governor Henry Smith.  His supporters in the General Council rewarded him with a commission as Colonel of Volunteers, and an independent command of an expedition intended to seize and hold the Mexican city of Matamoros.  As such, Fannin controlled the largest gathering of Texas troops at that time. 

Fannin's headquarters was at Goliad where an old Spanish fort was located.  His inability to make critical decisions, coupled with the pervasive Jacksonian egalitarianism of the time, doomed him and his command to destruction and historical disfavor.  He failed to push forward to Matamoros.  When it became apparent that Urrea had already reached that place and was beginning his march northward into Texas, Fannin put his men to work fortifying the old presidio.  When the plea for reinforcements from Travis (who was besieged at the Alamo) arrived, Fannin first ordered a march to San Antonio and then, at the urging of his officers, countermanded the order.  Learning that colonists lay in Urrea's path, he sent a detachment to their rescue.  When that detachment was trapped, he sent another to assist the first.  In the meantime, Houston (who had finally been given command of all troops in the field, even volunteers) sent orders for Fannin to destroy the fort and to retire.  Fannin chose to stay, hoping that his missing detachments would rejoin him.  Once he did decide to leave the relative safety of the fort, Fannin allowed Urrea to surround his command and, after an intense battle, was forced to surrender to the Mexican general.  Fannin and his men were marched back to the fort, held for a week, and then marched out by the Mexicans and killed on March 27, 1836--Palm Sunday. As Stout and others have pointed out, Fannin's record is not admirable. 

Stout's work is not a campaign history of the Texas Revolution--for that, readers might want to see Stephen L. Hardin's book, Texian Iliad (1996). What Stout has done is craft a narrative of events leading up to, and then detailing, the Goliad Massacre.  In order to accomplish this, he relied almost entirely on the information posted on two web sites: The Sons of DeWitte Colony Texas and The Handbook of Texas.  To give Stout credit, he has combined the available primary sources into a readable narrative.  If you are new to the Texas Revolution, Slaughter at Goliad will be a fresh, engaging story.  But, more seasoned students of the conflict will unfortunately render the verdict no author wants to hear:  "there is little here that is new." 

The work is best classified as a trade book rather than an addition to the scholarly works on the Texas Revolution.  Stout’s almost total reliance on accounts published on the internet highlights the opportunities for research made possible by the web.  Nevertheless, he either failed to consult or failed to credit the not insignificant bulk of secondary literature on the Texas Revolution in general, and Goliad specifically.  There are no references (even in the bibliography) to Chester Newell's History of the Revolution in Texas, Particularly of the War of 1835 & '36 (1838), Hardin's Texian Iliad, Kathryn Stoner O'Conner's Presidio La Bahía (2001), Jakie L. Pruett and Everett B. Cole's Goliad Massacre:  A Tragedy of the Texas Revolution (1985), or Stephen L. Moore's Eighteen Minutes:  The Battle of San Jacinto and the Texas Independence Campaign (2004).  There is no mention of John H. Jenkins's ten volume set, The Papers of the Texas Revolution (1973).Omissions such as these cast doubt on the author's depth of knowledge about the conflict.  It also makes it possible to discount what could otherwise have been "the most comprehensive treatment yet on the slaughter at Goliad" that Stout intended it to be (p. xii).

What are Stout's contributions if not in the realm of original research?  He is a talented writer who has pieced together a story that has been somewhat fragmented.  Thus, Slaughter at Goliad can best serve as a solid introduction to the killings at Goliad.  Stout also raises the important larger issue about what happened.  Was it a bona fide execution or was it a rank massacre?  Stout's title announces his position:  it was slaughter.

The Mexican government contended that the revolt in Texas was not really a revolt at all, but an invasion by "land pirates."  Volunteers from the United States, in small groups and organized companies, were indeed coming to Texas to help establish an independent republic in the breakaway state.  These men saw real links between the struggles of the American colonists of 1776 and the Texan colonists of 1835.  On December 30, 1835, the eve of Santa Anna’s advance into Texas, the Mexican Congress passed a law stating that any armed foreigner caught fighting against the government would be treated as a pirate.  Although not specifically spelled out, the implication was that this was to be a war without prisoners. 

At its core, the story of Goliad is about the treatment and ultimate fate of men captured on the battlefield.  Older literature on Goliad clearly proclaimed that what happened to the prisoners was a massacre.  What else could you call the shooting down of nearly four hundred men who had surrendered and thrown themselves on the mercy of their captors?  Moreover, subterfuge had been used to make the killings easier by telling the prisoners that they were being marched out of the fort so they could begin their journey to the coast, and then home.  Only the term massacre was strong enough to accurately describe the event.  Modern writers and community leaders sometimes blanch at the word, though.  After all, weren't the Mexican soldiers only following their government's orders?  The volunteers were considered outlaws (men outside the protection of the law) and Mexico had the right to treat them as such.  Even in 1836, however, many Americans and Mexicans had trouble accepting Santa Anna's claim that he was merely "following orders" when he insisted that men of Fannin's command be put to death.

Why should modern military historians care about Goliad?  The treatment of men captured on the battlefield (whether prisoners of war or enemy combatants) is particularly relevant following September 11, 2001.  I do not believe the canard that "one man’s terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."  Nevertheless, nations combating nongovernmental forces encounter the dilemma of what to do with prisoners.  As in the case of Goliad, it is possible to win the battle, but to then lose the public relations war in its aftermath.  One does not have to look far for current examples as to how this lesson still holds true.  Military historians would be well served to take Stout's advice to remember Goliad.


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## archade (Aug 4, 2009)

James D. Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the
War on Terrorism, (New York, Routledge, 2006), 230 pp.


MATTHEW JOHNSON
Missouri State University Fairfax, Virginia, USA


Special operations are a popular topic today. The conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the continuing “long war” against terrorism have dramatically increased interest and focus on special operations (SO) and special operations forces (SOF). There is, however, little written about the relationship between special operations and strategy. This is unfortunate— and potentially dangerous, given the increased role that Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the umbrella organization in charge of all U.S. SOF units, has been given to combat the irregular threats the United States currently faces. James D. Kiras has performed a valuable service by demystifying the role that special operations can play in a prolonged military campaign. This work is a serious and scholarly approach to the art and science of special operations.
Kiras has worked extensively with the U.S. special operations community and was heavily involved with formulating policy on how best to use SOF against terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. This adds significant authority to the author’s work and recommendations.Kiras is a strong proponent of SOF and SO but hiswork is devoid of hype and hero worship. Rather, his belief in the utility of specialized troops for unique missions is largely the focus of his work; Kiras has no desire to waste such valuable resources on strategically insignificant missions or to have such units given roles not suited to their skills. The author’s argument is straightforward: “the central argument of this work is that understanding how SOF perform in extended campaigns, by inflicting moral and material attrition in conjunction with conventional forces, is crucial in order for special operations to be effective strategically.”1 The author manages to clearly explain both the nature and potential value of special operations and of strategic effectiveness. The concept of strategic effectiveness is not without its challenges and little has been written on the strategic impact of special operations, let alone on how to employ such operations and units in a campaign.
The timing of the book is crucial and policymakers and defense planners would do well to heed its instructions. The author draws together two seemingly incompatible theories of warfare, annihilation and attrition. Annihilation theory, also known as strategic paralysis, “suggests avoiding prolonged material damage and inflicting moral damage through indirect strikes or maneuver against an identifiable center of gravity. Attrition, in contrast, is widely understood only as the extended material erosion of combat power in sustained offensives over time.”2 Historically, annihilation theorists have focused on crippling the enemy’s ability to conduct war by searching for his “Achilles heel” or center of gravity. Strategic paralysis theory has been popular with military and political leaders for obvious reasons. Technological developments have caused variations of strategic paralysis theory and its proponents to declare that the tank, airpower, or more recently, SOF can bring about a decisive victory. Kiras points out that, historically, strategic paralysis theory has not lived up to its promise.

Kiras advocates for a broader understanding of attrition theory that includes erosion not only of the enemy’smaterial forces, but of hismoral ones as well. Kiras is rather skeptical of the claims of strategic paralysis theory and believes that attrition theory more fully captures the actual conduct of warfare. This will no doubt shock some readers, as the conduct of World War I has become nearly synonymous with attritional warfare. Nevertheless, Kiras argues this is only a narrow understanding of attrition. Enemies and their populations have proved remarkably immune to sudden paralysis, despite promises to the contrary. A sober analysis of strategic effectiveness must take into account not only material factors but also issues such as willpower.
The author argues that SOF and SO are best utilized in a creative and appropriately designed attritional strategy in a long military campaign. This position is counter to the classic view of special operations as a means to inflict a critical blow to the enemy. The concept of the “decisive raid” is based on annihilation theory and seeks the fastest and most efficient way to cripple the enemy. Throughout the history of SOF and SO, armies have
attempted to use special units to kill critical leaders or destroy strategic targets, hoping that such an operation would provide a moral or material death blow to the enemy. Kiras mentions several such operations, including the Telemark Raid in World War II on the Norsk Hydro plant—an effort intended to destroy the German’s heavy water production.
However, Kiras argues that all too often participants and proponents have exaggerated or oversold the potential impact of special operations. The Telemark Raid, while impressive, tactically superb, and a significant morale boost for Allied forces, did not have a long-term strategic impact, as heavy water production resumed five months later. Another example and case study in the book was the Dambusters Raid, designed to shut down the factories in the Ruhr Valley. The operation failed to cripple German war production as intended, having only a modest strategic impact. Again, the concept of annihilation—packaged, in this case, within air power theory—shaped the conduct of a SO and even how it was evaluated by Allied leaders.
Interestingly, Kiras argues that the main purpose of SOF is to enhance the strategic effectiveness of conventional forces in a prolonged military campaign. This is not to say that the author dismisses the utility of independent SOF missions or roles, but rather that such operations much be placed within a larger strategic framework and not simply be seen as a series of isolated operations. All SO efforts must be appropriately aimed at achieving the overall strategic goals of the operation. Kiras’s work rests largely on the argument that special operations should have the intended effect of improving conventional military performance. Although the author is
aware that special operations are often referred to as “self-contained” acts of war, nevertheless, such actions must be viewed within a larger framework. Kiras is relentless in his quest to understand how special operations can improve strategic performance. The most important question to a strategist is “so what?” Few doubt that successful special operations are a powerful way to boost both public and military morale while potentially dealing an unexpected blow to the enemy. The question, however, is how such operations affect the outcome of the campaign. In other words, did the operations make any substantial difference to the outcome of the war? For example, the use of U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam can be viewed as a series of tactical and operational successes that did not have an overall significant strategic impact. There remains significant debate as to the role that such forces could have played if U.S. leaders would have understood how to properly employ them. Kiras explores a similar topic in his work as he discusses his second case study—the role of the British SAS in the liberation of France. The author boldly postulates the potential strategic impact of such a unit if military and political leaders would have properly understood its role and used it appropriately. The book’s case studies reveal the dangers of incorrectly using SOF and executing a SO. Kiras also addresses the internal struggle within the U.S. SOF community as to the best way to employ such forces. The success of SOF in Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in widespread admiration, general acceptance within the conventional military bureaucracy, and strong political support for SOF and special operations in general. The changed security environment has convinced many that the skills and roles of SOF will ensure an increased reliance on such units for the foreseeable future. Special Operations and Strategy also is highly valuable both in explaining the nature of strategy and special operations and drawing attention to how SOF can improve strategic performance. The author is well aware of the mystique surrounding special operations and SOF and the general misunderstanding of the capabilities and limitations of such units.
As his work demonstrates, if military leaders and policymakers undertake special operations without understanding how strategic effectiveness is achieved, SOF will be squandered or invested in inefficient ways. The Dambusters raid illustrates how preconceived ideas, strategic culture, and even wishful thinking can hinder sober evaluation of strategic performance.
SOF and SO will continue to play a vital role in the offensive strategy in the long war on terrorism and other irregular threats. Kiras clearly has a passion to ensure that such resources are utilized properly. There is a heated debate within the U.S. SOF community as to the best way to utilize such forces and which side of SOF—capturing and killing enemy targets or working with and training indigenous forces—should be given strategic and mission priority. Kiras’s position—that SOF are best utilized in a campaign of attrition—
represents another track. In Kiras’s model, all SOF units would be required and needed, not just hunter-killer units specializing in direct action and “snatch and grab” or only the “social workers with guns,” as Special Forces and Civil Affairs are sometimes dubbed, who focus on working with local populations. Special Operations and Strategy is an important original piece of scholarship and adds greatly to the literature of special operations and strategic theory in general; James Kiras should be commended for this important work. The author’s goal in writing the book is to
propose a framework to understand special operations and its contribution to the strategic effectiveness of a military campaign in the hope that such operations and units will not be misused by military commanders or policymakers, and he correctly points out that most discussions of special operations have focused on the impact of individual raids or the effectiveness of removing high-value targets. Most books written on SOF or special operations examine the impact of an operation, or a unit, or a period of time by examining the material or moral damage inflicted on the enemy. Kiras argues that the greatest utility of SOF is attrition of the enemy bothmorally and materially. This argument may strike readers, at first, as contradictory or even inaccurate but the author does an excellent job of building his case. The book is straightforward on the surface but confronts not only established military theory and doctrine but, more importantly, the philosophy behind current military practice. This fact sets Kiras’s book apart from contemporaryworks on SOF, as he addresses not only bureaucratic and strategic culture but what has shaped the formulation of strategy
and SOF’s role in it. Kiras has produced a tightly packed, scholarly piece on SOF and the nature of strategy itself. The book is not an easy read—it is aimed at policymakers and defense officials and may intimidate the causal reader who only enjoys works on SOF exploits—but it is an important contribution to the special operations community. For anyone seriously concerned about the future of SOF, this book needs to be read, reread, and deeply pondered. The lessons that current and future political and military leaders.

take away from this significant work may well determine how effectively SOF units are employed and whether or not future special operations will have a truly strategic impact for the United States.
Notes
1. JamesD.Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy: FromWorldWar II to theWar on Terrorism
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 112.
2. Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy, p. 3.
Jeremy


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## archade (Aug 8, 2009)

Mary Ann Heiss, S. Victor Papacosma, eds. NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts. Kent Kent State University Press, 2008. xv + 244 pp, ISBN 978-0-87338-936-5. 

 Reviewed by Luke A. Nichter (Texas A&M University-Central Texas)

Post-Pact Rivalry: New Insights into Intrabloc Rivalry 

Although scholars have studied interbloc conflicts in the Cold War repeatedly, recent declassification of materials by NATO and member states of both blocs since the early 1990s has permitted them a closer study of intrabloc behavior on both sides. Much of this action, especially in the Warsaw Pact, had been somewhat shrouded in mystery. The essays in this volume were drawn from papers delivered at a conference, "NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts," held at Kent State University and co-hosted by the Lemnitzer Center for NATO and European Union Studies and the then-Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (now the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security). The resulting volume provokes readers to consider issues of great importance, including the future of NATO, the ways in which both the Atlantic alliance and the Warsaw Pact handled crises that resulted in intra- as well as interbloc conflicts, new angles on the complexities of the Cold War, and the lessons that NATO still has to learn from the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. All of the essays are authored by scholars with broad expertise. 

An introductory essay by S. Victor Papacosma sets forth the origin and structure of the volume. Its editors chose to split the contributions into two sections, on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, respectively. Given the focus on intrabloc conflict, however, greater comparison might have been facilitated had the essays been organized according to the types of intrabloc conflicts they describe. These include conflict that arose from routine pact decision-making, conflicts between pact member states, conflicts between member states and pact leaders, and conflicts that arose at least partially because of a non-pact third party. 

The essays on conflict from routine pact decision-making reveal a strong contrast between the two sides of the Cold War. Lawrence S. Kaplan's "NATO United, NATO Divided: The Transatlantic Relationship" provides the backdrop for the NATO half of the volume. Kaplan argues that despite the constant presence of crisis or conflict with this alliance, the greatest sign of its enduring success is the lack of withdrawal by any member nation. NATO's recent expansion to the East also underlines this success. Kaplan notes that the greatest challenges to the alliance will be adaptation to expansion beyond its original boundaries and the need to respond to out-of-area conflicts. Meanwhile, Vojtech Mastny, in "The Warsaw Pact: An Alliance in Search of a Purpose," argues that the Warsaw Pact had a very different _raison d'être_ than NATO. While NATO clearly existed to protect member states against the Soviet threat, the true purpose of the Warsaw Pact was unclear at its inception in 1955. Mastny's argument is based on new archival evidence from former Warsaw Pact states, which shows that discord was rifer in the pact than outsiders used to suspect. In addition, Mastny notes that the Warsaw Pact's institutions were never tailored to accommodate a diversity of views, that the pact's purpose was more divisive than than of NATO, that its military and political purposes created an unresolved tension, and that Moscow never relied on it in the manner that Washington relied on NATO. 

A second group of essays treats intrabloc tensions that arose from bilateral disputes between pact nations. Mary Ann Heiss shows in "Colonialism and the Atlantic Alliance: Anglo-American Perspectives at the United Nations, 1945-1963" that, although NATO member states were the world's leading colonial powers, frequent discord on the issue emerged between member states, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. Historical support in the United States for self-determination and self-government as universal rights had influenced major elements of U. S. foreign policy, such as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and Franklin Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, while the United Kingdom expected its allies to respond to challenges to British colonial policy. In response, Heiss argues, American diplomats employed a variety of tools designed to soften anticolonial sentiment at the United Nations and other forums. French diplomacy also mitigated intrabloc tensions within NATO states, as shown in Charles Cogan's "The Florentine in Winter: François Mitterrand and the Ending of the Cold War, 1989-1991." Cogan argues that while it has become commonplace to criticize Mitterrand for his inability to anticipate the sudden German call for reunification in 1989-90, at a fading point of his career and while in poor health, Mitterrand maintained equilibrium in the French-German relationship and thus worked to anchor Germany to the West. Cogan pays particular attention to late 1991 Maastricht summit, in addition to other achievements that have thus far received scant attention from Mitterrand's detractors. 

In terms of intra-pact relations, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Germanies provoked their share of problems. With reference to the West, in tracing the origin and development of _Ostpolitik_, with its culmination during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at Helsinki in 1975, Oliver Bange demonstrates, as many of us have always suspected, that West German _Ostpolitik _provoked intrabloc tensions in NATO. In "Ostpolitik as a Source of Intrabloc Tensions," Bange moves beyond the standard interpretation that _Ostpolitik _caused sparks in the Bundestag as well as in bilateral relations with the United States to show that the policy resulted in pushback from Chancellor Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party and his coalition cabinet. Bange notes that Brandt sought to mitigate these problems by taking care not to speak of the ultimate objective of German reunification--preferring instead to use the term "zusammenwachsen." Regarding the Warsaw Pact, in "Polish-East German Relations, 1945-1958," Sheldon Anderson argues that insurmountable differences between the East German and Polish Communist parties precluded the "illegitimate" governments of each nation from brokering an honest reconciliation between their peoples after World War II. These differences included Polish administration of German territories east of the Oder-Neiße line, conflicting points of view toward policy regarding the West, especially West Germany, and tension over East German rearmament in 1956. In addition, the staunchly nationalist stance of the rank-and-file political leadership in both states posed a significant problem for Warsaw Pact cohesion on the strategic western front. Anderson notes that this problem became so serious that without intervention from the Soviet Union, a serious, perhaps epoch-making rupture would have occurred. Douglas Selvage, in "The Warsaw Pact and the German Question, 1955-1970: Conflict and Consensus," begins where Anderson left off by arguing that debate over Warsaw Pact policy toward the Germanies actually concerned how that body should function in the political realm. In particular, we learn that East Germany promoted the idea that the Warsaw Pact should serve as the "transmission belt" of the bloc as a way of bolstering its standing with Soviet leadership and improving East Germany's international position. Meanwhile, Polish leaders came into conflict with the East German government, and Poland sought to broaden the Warsaw Pact to take more interest in non-German issues. In the end, Selvage notes, Moscow tended to be more open to Polish than to East German views. 

Conflict also occurred as a result of tension between pact nations and their respective bloc leadership. First, in "Containing the French Malaise? The Role of NATO's Secretary General, 1958-1968," Anna Locher and Christian Nuenlist argue that among the many instances of intrabloc tension throughout NATO's existence, the era of French Gaullist foreign policy was the most intense. What emerges from their treatment of this otherwise familiar theme is the role of the three NATO secretaries general during this period--Paul Henri-Spaak, Dirk Stikker, and Manlio Brosio. While Spaak actively sought confrontation with French president Charles de Gaulle in tackling key controversies, Stikker and Brosio tried to minimize the appearance of crisis within NATO, but all three succeeded in addressing the French tendency toward obstructionism. Looking at this sort of conflict from the Warsaw Pact perspective, Csaba Békés shows the effect that even small states had within the Warsaw Pact. In "Why Was There No 'Second Cold War' in Europe? Hungary and the East West Crisis Following the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," the author argues that Hungary was able to oppose the Soviet invasion and exert pressure on Soviet leadership because Moscow considered it a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact. In addition, Békés adds, the Soviet invasion enhanced the development of a unique eastern European identity that in turn contributed to the emergence of a growing European self-awareness beginning in the 1960s. 

 Finally, intrabloc conflict could arise because of the actions of non-pact third parties. In "'Leaning by Doing': Disintegrating Factors and the Development of Political Cooperation in Early NATO," Winfred Heinemann illustrates the trade-off for pact member nations between national and collective interests. Pushback by the United States after the creation of NATO's " Three Wise Men" in 1956--a committee tasked with identifying ways that NATO integration could expand into areas of cooperation beyond collective defense--resulted in a much-diluted recommendation to hold regular meetings of NATO foreign ministers. On this failed effort to expand NATO into a true "Atlantic community," Heinemann argues that such desires would have burdened the alliance unreasonably. Indeed, expansion was always a source of tension for NATO. In "Failed Rampart: NATO's Balkan Front," John D. Iatrides argues that the decision of the Atlantic Council in October 1951 to admit Turkey and Greece into NATO, a step designed to impede the advance of Soviet forces into the eastern Mediterranean, represented a significant expansion of the defense community's capabilities. Although NATO membership alone was not enough to stem the perennial conflict between Turkey and Greece, all-out war did not occur, due in large part to direct intervention by the United States. While continued conflict between Turkey and Greece showed NATO member nations that a unified "Balkan front" was unrealistic, Iatrides notes the advantages that both nations received from their access to the resources of NATO member nations. 

As Jordan Baev shows, the Warsaw Pact also experienced difficulties along its southern borders. In "The Warsaw Pact and Southern Tier Conflicts, 1959-1969," Baev argues that at the beginning of this period Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria were all trustworthy allies of the Warsaw Pact. Yet, within the decade, Romania opposed Soviet initiatives in the Warsaw Pact, Albania opposed Soviet "revisionism," and Bulgaria suffered internal, allegedly Maoist, challenges to the nation's political leadership. Ultimately, she notes, this disintegration prompted western leaders such as Zbigniew Brzezinski to speak of the "desatellitization" and "heterogenization" of the Soviet bloc, which over time led to a different American policytoward eastern Europe. In dealing with another pact border, in "The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Warsaw Pact, 1969-1980," Bernd Schaefer argues that institutional links between the Warsaw Pact and China were severed as early as 1961 over differences in policy toward Vietnam and China's decision to cut relations with the entire Warsaw Pact except Romania during its own Cultural Revolution. From 1969 onward, the author notes, China had become increasingly dangerous to Moscow, especially after full normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations in January 1979. Moreover, any Soviet hopes for a warming in relations with China after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong were quickly dashed when the strong anti-Soviet direction of Mao's foreign policy persisted after his death. 

As these summaries indicate, many essays seem to conceptualize intrabloc conflict as a sign of the unraveling of perceived need for the alliances themselves. For example, in "The Multilateral Force as an Instrument for a European Nuclear Force?" Ina Megens argues that the idea that Europeans could one day provide their own nuclear protection was first raised at the end of the 1950s, when some west Europeans began to question the American nuclear guarantee. Such desires for independence created transatlantic tension during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations and suggested the need for a different type of bloc alliance. But, in sympathy with the wishes of European leaders such as Jean Monnet, the project met its end in late 1963 after Kennedy's assassination and the retirement of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. 

 Each of these contributions adds to our understanding of the origins and operations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, although over all, the essays rely more heavily on documents from the member nations of each pact rather than on sources from the pact leaderships: NATO documents, U.S. NATO documents, and documents from the Soviet Union. Certainly these are harder to come by, but especially in the case of NATO, these records have become available at the NATO archives in Brussels in recent years. Thus, we await their use before we can learn more about the inner workings of this enduring transatlantic reliance. As additional primary source documents become available, no doubt our understanding of intrabloc conflict will continue to develop. However, criticisms aside, this volume greatly advances our understanding of the inner workings of the two most powerful military alliances in history during a period of time in which the possibility that they could meet each other in armed conflict was never distant from policymakers' concerns.


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## archade (Aug 14, 2009)

Sasha Lezhnev. Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. Forward by John Prendergast. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2005. xv + 119 pp. Chronology of events, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 0-7391-0957-X (paper), ISBN 0-7391-1765-3. 

Reviewed for H-War by Iavor Rangelov, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science 

Warlords, Practitioners, and Scholars 

Books written for practitioners must offer straightforward solutions to problems that scholars often identify as intractable. Sasha Lezhnev's project--to articulate guidelines for countering warlords in failing state--is more ambitious. The book takes a comparative approach to the subject, drawing on two case studies: Sierra Leone and Tajikistan. Furthermore, the author's template for analysis implicitly incorporates some key lessons distilled from the academic literature. Nevertheless, this study will resonate better in policy circles rather than in academic ones, since at times the narrative moves too quickly from evidence to prescription and leaves important issues and arguments under theorized. 

 The narrative unfolds by offering a definition of warlordism in a globalized framework, then zooms out to consider the success of various efforts pursued in the context of the two cases, and closes with recommendations for designing strategies to deal with warlords. The author breaks down the definition of warlords by looking at their motivations and social make-up; the weak state environment that allows them to flourish; the methods that warlords employ (converging on assaults on civilians); and the organizational structures that enable effective mobilization and control. Sierra Leone and Tajikistan are then analyzed to illustrate the definition, emphasizing the degrees of warlordism (the former being closer to the ideal type than the latter), and are used to sift through evidence of what works and what fails in eliminating warlords. Important differences, for example pertaining to identity politics and the nature of the collapsing state regime, are briefly mentioned but not integrated in an overall framework. 

The book emphasizes that sustainable peace requires efforts to dislodge warlords and to transform the broader political and security environment, arguing for alternatives to the standard approach that incorporates warlords in power-sharing structures in exchange for peace. Lezhnev's solution is a mix of short-term strategies of coercion to deal with intransigent warlords, and longer-term strategies of state-building to transform political incentives. Coercive options include imposing "smart" sanctions that are resource-sensitive and have a global reach; deploying internal, international or "transnational" (mixed) force; prosecuting warlords under international criminal law; and establishing programs for disarmament, demobilization, and  reintegration. State-building policies involve undermining the power of warlords by supporting alternative sources of authority; promoting democratization; fostering economics reconstruction and employment; and, as a last resort, conducting structured peace negotiations that may provide for warlord reintegration. 

 The study is driven by a problem-solving imperative and moves swiftly from empirical analysis to policy recommendations. This sleek structure, however, comes at a price. Most of the key arguments are constructed at the interface of the Sierra Leone and Tajikistan cases, but in order to generalize them coherently the author needs a broader framework that is often missing. The field of ethnic conflict studies has moved to conceptualize the role of identity in recent conflicts and the dynamics of peace-building in such settings. Research on collapsing state structures, violence against civilians, and the globalized war economy has made rapid advances in the last years and is well integrated in the "new wars" literature. Similarly, the mushrooming literature on human security has developed the principles of multilateralism, regional focus, and rebuilding legitimate political authority in responses to warlord-driven conflict. Lack of deeper engagement with these bodies of scholarship will be puzzling for some academic readers. To be sure, however, the strategies to deal with warlords offered by Lezhnev are persuasive and relevant, even if they often reflect the underlying problem without capturing it explicitly. Since the book is addressed primarily to practitioners and policymakers, its target audience will be rewarded for picking it up.


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## archade (Aug 20, 2009)

Thomas M. Nichols. Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xiv + 171 pp, ISBN 978-0-8122-4066-5. 

Reviewed by John T. Broom Published on H-War (August, 2009) Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine 

The Westphalian Order, Strained to Breaking 

 To many, September 11, 2001 was the day the world changed. Shortly afterward, President George W. Bush let it be known that the United States would act proactively in the world, identifying potential threats and dealing with them before they were actualized. This went far beyond the generally recognized right of sovereign states to act preemptively against imminent threats. The Bush Doctrine, as it became known, clearly warned that the United States would employ preventive war against potential threats, whether from rouge states, failed states, or non-state actors. In fact, as Thomas M. Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College clearly discusses in his book _Eve of Destruction_, this was not new with George W. Bush, but had emerged in the early days of the post-Cold War world. Whether undertaken in the name of humanitarian action, or more realistically because national interests were involved, this blurring of the lines laid down as part of the Westphalian (1648) Western major-state diplomatic system was, according to Nichols, clearly evident during the administration of President William J. Clinton. Over the course of the past fifteen years, other states have either exercised or claimed the right to act preventively, including Russia and the Peoples' Republic of China.

I emphasize Western major states because the non-Western world (in particular) as well as minor states were often, at least in the pre-World War II era, the targets of preventive war waged by the major Western powers. Occasionally, major powers waged preventive war against each other. Nichols pointedly cites the Japanese attack on the United States in 1941 (by which time Japan had been admitted to the major power "club") as one such example. Since the Second World War, the collective security apparatus of the United Nations (UN) has at least nominally added all sovereign states to the formerly Western diplomatic system. 

To this emerging trend of preventive war might be added the re-emergence of significant non-state actors engaging in what was once known as "private war." This is, again, something that the Westphalian system had hoped to relegate to the edges of diplomacy, and war-making. Terror groups, revolutionary groups, criminal gangs, and various other non-state actors have engaged in significant cross-border operations that rise to the level of acts of war. All of this has strained the old Westphalian order to the breaking point. 


Nichols, like Colin S. Gray in _The Sheriff: America's Defense of the New World Order_ (2004), examines possible options for how the United States in particular, and the major powers in general, will have to deal with this new geopolitical and diplomatic reality. Gray, who admittedly wrote well before the current economic crisis had begun to manifest itself to anyone but specialists, made the case for the United States acting alone if necessary, or with posses of the willing if possible, in order to protect at least Western interests. Nichols, however, endorses a restructured UN. He admits that the current UN is incapable of effectively acting to protect the world, or the interests of the West (particularly the United States) from the contagion of failed states, and the malice of rogue states. Nichols cites such things as the membership of such paragons of human rights as Libya and Zimbabwe in the UN Human Rights Commission. Nichols does lay out a possible set of reforms for the UN, including changing the veto process. Whether they could be successfully implemented is another question entirely. Personally, this reviewer does not think so. Nichols also explores other options, including regional organizations and groupings of similarly minded states, but in the end, rejects them as insufficient. 

Nichols's book is not really a work of military history, although obviously it has implications for military historians. His grasp of diplomatic history, especially of recent diplomatic history, is 
sound, and his understanding of international relations theory and organizations is a strength of the work. Nichols develops and uses a variety of sources, including many from both foreign governments and press organs. His notes, in themselves, can be fascinating reading.


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## archade (Aug 26, 2009)

Soviet Air Power: Tactics and Weapons used in Afghanistan

Lieutenant Colonel Denny R. Nelson

THE Soviet war in Afghanistan has provided a plethora of information about the Soviets and their use of military power. Additionally, the war has allowed the Soviets to learn many lessons and has offered them the opportunity to train, apply various tactics, and experiment with different weapons. Curiously, however, although the Soviets paralyzed the Afghan government initially with troops airlifted into the capital city of Kabul and since then have used helicopter, fighter-bomber, and bomber operations in the war, very little has been compiled heretofore in open U.S. sources regarding Soviet air power experiences and tactics. By studying Soviet use of air power in Afghanistan, we might gain a better understanding of Soviet air power doctrine and how the Soviets may employ air power in future conflicts.
Airlift

Soviet military doctrine stresses the primacy of offensive operations aimed at stunning and preventing organized resistance by opponents. In Afghanistan, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets used the surprise landing of airborne units at strategic centers, particularly around the capital, in conjunction with the speedy movement of ground units along strategic routes toward vital centers to gain the initiative.1 The military invasion began on Christmas night, 1979, when the Soviets staged a massive, single-lift operation involving an estimated 280 transport aircraft packed with troops, munitions, and equipment. The aircraft were reported to be I1-76s (closely resembling the U.S. C-141), An-22s (a Soviet turboprop strategic transport), and An-12s (a C-130 equivalent). Subsequent airlifts completed the placement of three airborne divisions in Afghanistan.2

The size and swiftness of the airlift operation are significant. Each Soviet airborne division normally comprises nearly 8500 men, including artillery and combat support elements.3 The 280 transport aircraft represented approximately 38 percent of the total Soviet military transport air force (Voyenno-Tranportnaya Aviatsiya or VTA). If Aeroflot, the Soviet civilian airline, is included in the total transport capability figures, the 280 transport aircraft represented approximately 29 percent of the total Soviet transport fleet. This sizable transport fleet is a significant Soviet asset, contributing to the capability of the Soviets to mobilize and deploy quickly large numbers of troops. The Christmas night airlift was, of course, only the initial stage of the invasion; massive airlift of troops, equipment, and supplies has continued to flow into Afghanistan. To date, no Soviet transport aircraft appear to be permanently based in Afghanistan; transports are rotated in and out from air bases in the Soviet Union.4

Ironically, the Soviets may be copying U.S. transport tactics used in Vietnam. Soviet sources have suggested that An-12 Cub transports have been used as bombers by rolling bombs down and off the tail ramp while in flight.5 In Vietnam, the United States used 15,000-pound bombs dropped from C-130 transports to clear helicopter assault zones in the jungle.

Tactical airlift aircraft are used primarily, however, in their traditional role of supply. The Soviets have found that they often cannot use ground convoys to supply many outposts in the sparsely settled provinces along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. Even such significant bases as Khost and Gardez––each held by a battalion or regiment of the Kabul regime––normally must be supplied by air, while smaller outposts in these provinces require parachute drops for resupply.6
Helicopters

Perhaps the most widely used element of Soviet air power in the Afghan war is the helicopter. Helicopters have been used extensively in varied types of military missions. Estimates of helicopter strength range from 500 to 650 machines, of which up to 250 may be the Mi-24 Hind gunships.7

The Hind is an extremely lethal weapon, with machine guns or cannon in the nose turret and up to 192 unguided missiles under its stub wings. It has room for eight to twelve ground troops and their equipment in the fuselage, and it is widely used by the Soviets for punitive and search-and-destroy missions.8 The Hind has also been used to provide close air support for ground troops, to strike Afghan villages (sometimes in conjunction with fixed-wing aircraft), and to conduct armed-reconnaissance missions to detect and attack guerrilla groups.9

Due to its heavy armor, the Hind is nearly impervious to guerrilla small arms unless the guerrillas can fire down at the helicopters using weapons positioned high on the sides of mountains.10 The Hind has only three known vulnerable points: the turbine intakes, the tail rotor assembly, and an oil tank inexplicably but conveniently located beneath the red star on the fuselage.11

The terrain in Afghanistan has had considerable influence on the use of the Hind. Many of the narrow roads in Afghanistan snake through valleys overlooked by steep, tall mountains. Such terrain provides perfect ambush situations. As a result, whenever a Soviet troop column or supply convoy moves into guerrilla territory, it is accompanied by Hinds whose pilots have developed a standard escort tactic. Some Hinds hover over the ground convoy, watching for guerrilla activity, while others land troops on high ground ahead of the advancing column. These troops secure any potential ambush positions and provide flank security until the column has passed; they are themselves protected against guerrilla attack by the Hinds that inserted them and subsequently hover overhead. Once the convoy passes their position, the troops are picked up and reinserted farther along the route. Convoy protection is also provided by other Hinds that range ahead of the column to detect and strike guerrillas that may have concentrated along the route.12

Other information on Hind tactics indicate that a closer relationship between air and ground arms has been a major aim of the Soviet force development (the helicopter is a part of the Soviet Air Force). Hinds are the primary Soviet close air support weapon in Afghanistan. They not only strike enemy forces in contact with Soviet troops but sometimes carry out attacks as much as twenty to thirty kilometers forward of the forward edge of battle area. This tactic is apparently an attempt to increase responsiveness, tactical flexibility, and integration with ground forces.13

The Soviets have had some problems with their helicopters. In 1980, losses to SA-7 surface-to-air missiles (a hand-held, heat-seeking missile) led to a change in tactics at the end of 1980 or early 1981. Since then, the Hinds have used nap-of-the-earth flight patterns, for which the machines were not designed nor their crews properly trained. There have been reports of Hind rotors striking the rear of their own helicopters during some of these nap-of-the-earth flights. The wear on airframes and systems caused by these lower-altitude flights has also greatly increased rates of operational attrition.14

These nap-of-the-earth tactics are a significant change from those employed in 1979-80. Hind crews then showed little fear of the opposition, attacking with machine guns, 57-mm rockets, or cluster and high-explosive 250-kg bombs normally during diving attacks from a 1000-meter altitude. After the firing pass, they would break away in a sharp evasive turn or terrain-hugging flight before repositioning for another firing pass. The Soviets used these tactics with several Hinds in a circular pattern, similar to the American "wagon wheel" used in Vietnam. Such tactics may still be used in some parts of Afghanistan, but by and large they have been changed.

Reportedly, new tactics that use scout helicopters for target acquisition have been adopted for both attack helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. These scouts are usually Hinds (or, in some cases, Mi-8 Hips) rather than smaller, lighter helicopters. Normally, they stay high, out of range of the target, giving crews a better field of view while directing attacks. This tactic may become standard in future Soviet conflicts.15

Current reports say the Hind now begins an attack run 7000 to 8000 meters from the target, running in at low altitude and then rising 20 to 100 meters in altitude to fire. Firing usually commences at maximum range, and mutual support is emphasized. One tactic that has endured the war has been to send one helicopter in at high altitude to draw enemy fire, while wingmen remain low, behind a ridge, ready to attack anyone who opens fire.16

The Soviets are also using helicopters in mass formations (a standard Soviet tactic). Reports have helicopters in packs of four and six, hovering, firing their rockets and machine guns, circling, hunting, and then swooping down and firing again.17

While the Hind is the primary attack helicopter being used in Afghanistan, the Soviets have also made extensive use of the big multi-purpose Mi-8 Hip in several different capacities. One of the major missions of the Hip is to serve as the main troop carriers.18 In this role, the Hip is enhanced by its ability to provide its own fire support/suppression with 57-mm rocket pods.19 The Hip has also been used for aerial minelaying, which the Soviets have found is a good way to reinforce a defensive perimeter quickly. Furthermore, the Hip has been used as a heavily armed attack helicopter to complement the Hind.20 As with the Hind, the Soviets have found problems with the Hip. These have come primarily in the areas of its exposed fuel system (a major hazard to crews in case of a crash), short rotor life, lack of engine quick-change capability, poor engine performance, and inadequate trim control. The engine and trim problems result from the low-density air conditions found in the high, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, which force the engine to work harder and make hovering difficult.21

The Mi-4 Hound has also been employed in the war, often in concert with the Hind. Many helicopter airstrikes start with two Mi-4 Hounds, which attack with unguided rockets and machine gun fire, followed by four Hinds, which continue the strike with rockets and cannon. While the Hinds attack, the Hounds circle, ejecting heat decoy flares at regular intervals, apparently in an effort to protect the helicopters from hand-held SA-7s. The Hounds also have been reported to hover near villages being shelled, perhaps acting as air controllers for ground-based artillery.22

One other type of helicopter that the Soviets are using in Afghanistan is the big Mi-6 Hook. It has been used extensively to provide heavy lift support for Soviet forces.23

Observers report that Soviet helicopter roles in the war have varied from dropping Soviet parachutists, antipersonnel mines, bombs, and leaflets to providing close air support for Soviet armor. Yet, while significant tactical changes have occurred, the broad picture of Soviet Frontal Aviation tactics in Afghanistan has remained largely unchanged. Trends and concepts observed prior to the war have been reinforced. The Hips still carry troops for airmobile assaults and provide suppression; the Hind remains the Soviets' primary source of airborne firepower.24
Fighter-Bombers

Helicopters may be the main element of Soviet air power in Afghanistan, but evidence indicates that the Soviets are testing their fighter-bombers and associated weapons and tactics in the Afghan war as well. Compared to reports on their helicopter use, very little on the type of fighter-bomber tactics that the Soviets are using has appeared in the open press. However, enough has been published to provide a glimpse of Soviet fighter-bomber philosophy.

Soviet fighter-bombers have been employed exclusively in the air-to-ground role, since the Afghan guerrillas offer no air-to-air threat. They have been used for carpet bombing, terror bombing, and scorched-earth bombing in efforts to destroy the guerrillas or drive them from the country. Combined with helicopter attacks, Soviet fighter-bombers have pounded settlements throughout the country. Half of the city of Herat (Afghanistan's third largest city, with a population of 150,000) was leveled in an extremely heavy, brutal, and prolonged attack.25

Most Soviet fighter-bomber crews are trained for close air support roles with ground troops in the European theater. In Afghanistan, they have also proved their value on sorties against targets deep inside guerrilla territory. Houses, crops, livestock, vineyards, and orchards in some areas have been systematically bombed and rocketed in what appears to be a scorched-earth campaign aimed at denying the guerrillas food and shelter. Terror bombings of villages, by both MiG aircraft and helicopters, have reportedly become commonplace in areas that are sympathetic to the guerrilla movement. To complete the destruction, ground troops often enter these areas after an air assault and shoot at anything alive, eventually turning everything of value into rubble.26

Early in the war, the primary fighter-bomber used by Soviet forces was the MiG-21 Fishbed. The Fishbed has one twin-barrel 23-mm gun with 200 rounds of ammunition in a belly pack, and it can carry four 57-mm rocket packs, two 500-kg bombs, and two 250-kg bombs, or four 240-mm air-to-surface rockets in a typical ground attack configuration.27 Tactically, the MiG-2s have generally operated in pairs, 28 but they attack individually, taking turns firing rockets at or bombing guerrilla positions. After releasing their ordnance, they each eject three sets of four heat decoy flares as they climb away. Again, the flares are an apparent attempt to negate any SA-7 threat. Reports also indicate that the MiG-21s often fire from a range of about 2000 meters, which makes their strikes somewhat inaccurate and ineffective. This tactic, combined with the failure of many bombs to explode on impact and the failure of some cluster bombs to deploy and scatter, has at times rendered the Soviet fighter-bombers ineffective.29

Still other reasons have been cited for the ineffectiveness of the MiG-21. All seem valid. First, the MiG-21 is best suited as an air-to-air platform. Second, the guerrillas are an elusive enemy, and any kind of early warning of an impending airstrike helps negate the effects of that strike. Third, the mountainous terrain, where most of the guerrilla resistance is located, tends to restrict the effectiveness of air-to-ground fire.30 The steep, deep, winding ravines and valleys make the use of high-speed aircraft somewhat sporty, and Soviet pilots have often pushed the Fishbeds to their flight limitations. Like the helicopters, the fighter-bombers in Afghanistan are affected adversely by the high altitudes associated with terrain that includes 10,000-20,000-foot mountain peaks. The fourth major difficulty experienced by the Soviet air forces seems to be a lack of an adequate quick-reaction tactical fighter-bomber strike capability. The use of forward air controllers (FACs), especially in the mode in which the United States used them in Vietnam, has been conspicuously absent (although, as noted previously, some helicopter FACs apparently have been used). The fifth drawback appears to be the lack of any significant night or all-weather fighter-bomber capability.31

To counter some of these drawbacks, the Soviets have introduced their new Su-25 Frogfoot fighter-bomber into the war. The Frogfoot, designed as a close-support aircraft, is similar in performance to the USAF A-10. At least one squadron operates from Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. The Frogfoot can carry up to 10,000 pounds of ordnance on ten stations, making it a formidable weapon.32 Tactically, the Frogfoot operates in loose pairs, going in separately and very low. Weapons accuracy has improved considerably, and the Frogfoot is used primarily to hit point targets in rough terrain. Delivery distances, from the weapons release point to the target impact point, have increased steadily, making the Frogfoot a much-feared weapon system.

The Soviets have also employed the Su-17 Fitter, the Su-24 Fencer, and MiG-23 Flogger in the war. These aircraft engage in intensive bombings of known guerrilla concentrations and installations. In the April-May 1984 timeframe, their combined sortie generation was estimated to be more than 100 per day. During this period, the Fitters and Fishbeds were relegated primarily to missions requiring general accuracy, while the Fencer, the Flogger, and especially the Frogfoot were used more for direct air support against point targets.33 Very little has been published about the tactics used or limitations incurred by these aircraft.
Bombers

Recently, the Soviet Union introduced the Tu-16 Badger into the aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. The Badger is a medium-range bomber that can carry bomb loads up to 19,800 pounds. Its service ceiling is listed as 40,350 feet above sea level.34

The Badgers, stationed inside the Soviet Union, were apparently first used in the bombing campaign directed against the city of Herat.35 Prior to 21 April 1984, the Soviets deployed numerous Badger bombers on their common border with Afghanistan. On 21 April, they began high-altitude carpet bombing against guerrilla villages and strongholds in the Panjshir Valley, which is located approximately seventy miles north of the capital city of Kabul. Reports indicate that thirty-six Badger36 bombers were being used, and that thirty to forty airstrikes a day were being flown.37

With the service ceiling listed for the Badgers, they probably can bomb at a maximum of only 20,000 feet above the highest peaks in the mountain ranges. But since most of the targets are in the valley floor, bomb releases can still remain high above the target impact points. The bombers are relatively safe because the guerrillas apparently have no weaponry that can accurately reach the bombers' altitude. The Badger attacks are followed by close-in attacks from fighter-bombers, helicopters, and artillery shelling. 38 The bombing raids, flown in support of Soviet ground forces advancing into the valley, signal an apparent willingness on the part of the Soviets to use any conventional air power available to support their ground operations.
Weapons

Many other types of air-delivered weapons beyond those already mentioned have allegedly been employed by the Soviets in Afghanistan. The major headline grabber has been the alleged Soviet use of chemical warfare (CW). However, numerous conflicting reports surround this matter, with hearsay rather than hard evidence forming the basis for most conclusions.

A somewhat unique use of Soviet aircraft has been to lay down smoke screens. Smoke plays an important role in Soviet mountain fighting doctrine. By masking ground troop movements, it helps the Soviets achieve surprise. The Soviets also use air-delivered smoke to mark and direct artillery fire for their land forces.39

Other weapons employed by Soviet air forces include napalm40 and various types of antipersonnel mines. The standard small antipersonnel mine explodes when stepped on. This weapon does not seem to be designed to kill, but rather to injure. The injured person helps demobilize the guerrillas because they have to transport casualties. Thus slowed, the guerrillas become more vulnerable to helicopter attacks. Reportedly, many Soviet antipersonnel mines are camouflaged as toys, watches, ballpoint pens, or even books, which explode when picked up, blowing off fingers, hands, arms, etc. According to some accounts, these weapons have been aimed also at some of the civilian population in an effort to demoralize those who are pro-guerrilla.41 In an apparent effort to eliminate as many guerrillas as possible, the Soviets also have dropped enhanced-blast bombs and large blockbuster bombs. These weapons explode in midair, sending out lethal shock waves in a large-radius kill zone.42
Command, Control, and Communications

To complement the Soviet war effort, both in the air and on the ground, the Soviets have used a wide variety of command, control, and communications (C3) equipment and procedures. A look at the Soviet C3 system gives an insight into the complexities involved in the war and the Soviet ability to conduct such an undertaking.

The first two weeks of the invasion were an enviable demonstration of top level C3 and coordination. The C3 link went via satellite communications (Satcom) from the Army headquarters in Moscow to Termez, located in Soviet territory on the northern border of Afghanistan. Control of the complex and tightly scheduled initial airlift assault was impressive, with different aircraft types arriving from various routes. Radio command posts controlled the two motorized rifle divisions (MRDs) in their land invasion two days later, as well as the four MRDs that arrived within the next two weeks.

In mid-January 1980, the command post was relocated from Termez to Kabul, which has become the communications hub for the Soviet occupation force. Apparently, the antiaircraft, antitank, electronic countermeasures (ECM), and Frog missiles (a surface-to-surface missile) that normally accompany and comprise a Soviet C3 network of this type have since been removed, leaving the Soviet Signal Troop section as the major electronic element in the war effort. Within the Signal Troop is a wire company, which has three platoons: one for line construction and two for radio relay. In addition to the Signal Troop, each Soviet airborne division has one signal company of 22 officers and 221 enlisted men, 30 jeep-type vehicles, 23 GAZ-66 trucks, 11 motorcycles, and 9 SA-7 portable SAMs. Communications between the headquarters and MRDs are usually via UHF or VHF radios and/or land lines.43

According to Soviet literature, the signal companies have C3 survivability through concealment, dispersal, hardness, mobility, and redundancy. In addition to establishing various radio nets, the signal troops lay telephone and telegraph wire that provides communications via land lines. Thus, the Soviets use four systems to communicate:

    * Line-of-sight––UHF,VHF, and microwave for twenty- to thirty-mile ranges.

    * Troposcatter––set on vans or in fixed positions, with relays about 200 miles apart.

    * Satcom––Malniya, Gorizont, and Kosmos series networks. The earlier Satcoms were in twelve-hour elliptical orbits; the newer ones are in synchronous twenty-four-hour orbits.

    * Land lines––existing civilian lines or lines laid by Soviet forces. The Soviets favor secure underground land lines.44

Since the invasion, the Soviets have divided Afghanistan into seven military districts. The main army headquarters near Kabul may have Satcom and troposcatter links to some military districts or bases but not to all. Therefore, because of field command delays and the rigidity of the Soviet communications channels, it appears that each district commander has been given more than usual latitude to meet the combat needs of his area.45

Preplanned air support seems adequate in Afghanistan, but the Soviets seem to lack an adequate quick-reaction airstrike capability in support of field troops. To receive an airstrike, a junior-grade infantry officer must send a request, which is forwarded up to the division level in the Army and then over to the Air Force; there are delays at each command level and communications point. Associated with these delays is the fact that the Soviet army has neither aviation helicopters nor forward air controllers (although recently helicopter scouts have been used to some degree). Soviet air force helicopters and support aircraft are at the division level for Army interface. The compound communications structure tends to hamper support for truck convoys or airborne operations unless events proceed strictly in accordance with the advanced plan. An example of the communications problems that stem from this system can be seen in a July 1981 battle with guerrilla forces that occurred twelve miles from Kabul; here Soviet close-air-support jets mistakenly strafed Soviet and Afghan army troops.46

All in all, Afghanistan presents a benign electronic environment to the Soviets, with minimal need for electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM), jamming, or smart weapons to home on emissions. The guerrilla forces rely primarily on runners or civilian walkie-talkies for communications.47

Meanwhile, the Soviets are using long-range surveillance-type radars, which they have installed in Afghanistan, to observe air activities in the neighboring countries of the People's Republic of China, Pakistan, Iran, and other Persian Gulf states. It is highly probable that Soviet electronic intelligence and ECM troops are collocated with these surveillance radars to monitor electronic emissions in Iran, the People's Republic of China, Pakistan, etc., since that is a somewhat standard Soviet tactic.48

The Soviet army communications environment in Afghanistan has changed from mobile and temporary tent-city layouts to sites with permanent buildings, fixed communications sites, and fixed antenna arrays. According to reports, Soviet engineers have established elaborate communications centers at a headquarters north of Kabul (at Bagram), as well as elsewhere in the country. Yet, while probably enhancing Soviet communications, these sites also provide lucrative targets for the guerrillas; and attacks on various communications sites have been reported.49

A variety of other electronic equipment also is being used. These systems include ground control approach, surveillance radar, and precision approach radar to control aircraft into and out of air bases, plus various radars that control the different types of Soviet SAMs positioned in Afghanistan. The avionics in Soviet fighters, helicopters, and reconnaissance aircraft are probably being tested in a combat environment. Laser ranges, low-light TV and infrared sensors, radars, computers, and communications are installed in both the MiG-23 Flogger and the Su-25 Frogfoot. Earlier-model Su-17 Fitter and MiG-21 Fishbed fighters have moderate electronics on board. Due to limited forward maintenance support, Soviet aircraft are ferried to depots inside the Soviet Union for overhaul or repairs. It is probable that communications equipment is not adequately supported in the field except for simple module swapping.50

Lessons have been expensive but valuable for the Soviets in the electronic and communications arenas. Two examples stand out. The Soviet army is now replacing 1950s-vintage tactical field transceivers with newer, standard backpack and vehicle models. In addition, redundancy in Soviet command posts and the effectiveness of specific communication methods are being tested by guerrilla raids on garrisons and cities throughout the country. Overall, the Soviet communications personnel appear to be fulfilling their tasks even under adverse and primitive conditions, primarily because the new-technology troposcatters and Satcoms have reached the field level and are augmenting the simplistic land lines historically preferred by Soviet army communicators.51
Air Base Gains

The Soviets have gained much more than valuable experience in the Afghan war. They have gained many strategically important and possibly permanent air bases. Seven air bases have been built or improved by the Soviets in Afghanistan: Herat, Shindand, Farah, Kandahar, Kabul International Airport, Bagram, and Jalalabad. All of these airfields are now all-weather, jet-capable bases that are operable 365 days a year. At last report, Jalalabad air base has been used exclusively for helicopter operations but has jet capacity. Since each base is capable of handling large numbers of tactical aircraft, a huge fleet could be operated in Afghanistan or against other Southwest Asian countries from these bases.52

In the Afghan panhandle that stretches northeast to the People's Republic of China, the Soviets have cleared out the sparse population and are building highways, air bases, and an air defense and early warning network. The airfields may be nothing more than sod strips for resupply of the electronic intelligence sites located there, or they may become jet-capable. This area provides better terrain than the Soviets had in this central Asian military district previously, thereby improving their forward geographic position.53

The two most important Soviet installations in Afghanistan are at Bagram and Shindand. Bagram is the local supreme headquarters of the entire Soviet army in Afghanistan, where most of the senior Soviet officers in Afghanistan, as well as their Satcom system and other major facilities, are located. At Shindand, no Afghans are permitted on the air base because the Soviets have installed support and maintenance equipment for their naval aviation reconnaissance bombers. Soviet electronic warfare aircraft (converted bombers and converted transports) are operated from this installation by the air command of the Soviet navy. Most of these aircraft are not permanently based in any one location, so having the very sensitive technical support and maintenance capabilities needed for them available at various forward bases offers vital support for their missions.54

Having jet bases in the western/southwestern section of Afghanistan also places longer-range MiG-27 Flogger fighter-bombers and MiG-25 Foxbat reconnaissance aircraft 200 miles closer to, and within range of, the Strait of Hormuz––the strategic chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. SAM-8 antiaircraft missiles have been installed to defend most of these bases, although currently there is no apparent air threat.55 Having these bases eliminates any overflight problems that the Soviets might have incurred from an independent Afghanistan and allows Soviet electronic warfare aircraft more time to trail and monitor U.S. naval activities in the Indian Ocean.56
Combat Experience and Lessons Learned

The Soviets have learned and continue to learn many valuable lessons in their war in Afghanistan. Whether they win or lose their battle with the guerrillas is perhaps not as significant militarily as the lessons they learn, the experience they gain in warfighting, and the knowledge they obtain about the effectiveness of their weapons. Afghanistan, which is about the size of Texas and has terrain that varies from deserts to rugged mountains, affords the Soviets ample opportunities (and time) to experiment with their aircraft, tactics, weapons, and command and control equipment and procedures.

From the standpoint of world power politics, the Kremlin has demonstrated in Afghanistan its ability to project power outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union through a massive airlift operation. This demonstrated ability creates a worrisome problem for other nations, especially those bordering on or near Soviet territory.

Evidence from Afghanistan indicates that the Soviet military has become increasingly reliant on its helicopter force. Most likely, this dependency will remain a part of the Soviet military system after the Afghan issue is resolved. Current helicopter roles that could easily transfer to other theaters, depending on the terrain and capabilities of the enemy, are: (1) landing forces on peaks to envelop an enemy in support of ground advances, (2) providing aerial attacks to channel the enemy into killing zones where ground forces can inflict maximum casualties, (3) providing close air support for advancing ground forces, (4) moving troops and supplies, and (5) acting as scouts or forward air controllers.57

Fixed-wing fighter-bombers, at least the older models, have proved somewhat ineffective in the air-to-ground role in which they have been used. As time elapses, more information on the successes and failures of later models should become available for analysis. The same can be said concerning the high-altitude saturation bombings being conducted by the Tu-16 bombers.

Some significant changes already appear to be occurring within the Soviets' command, control, and communications system. Some latitude in decision making is apparently now given to lower levels of command, and communications equipment is being improved. These changes should improve the Soviets' worldwide fighting ability. However, surface evidence indicates that the Soviet decision-making process is still controlled at fairly high levels, is still heavily layered, and continues to lack responsiveness.

A major advantage that the Soviets are gaining is combat experience. Exercises are good training, but real combat is the only true test of commanders, unit personnel, and equipment. Soviet Signal Troops in Afghanistan have a 25-percent turnover every six months.58 It seems logical to assume that crewmembers in helicopters, fighter-bombers, bombers, etc., would also be rotated frequently to ensure that a large segment of the Soviet manpower force gains combat experience and a chance to hone individual combat skills. It follows that reports of various tactics and the effectiveness of different weapons would receive high-level scrutiny from Kremlin officials and that refinements would be made to enhance the effectiveness of Soviet air power. Gradually, the Soviets are learning the same hard lessons we learned in Vietnam. Fighting guerrilla forces with conventional forces is a long, arduous affair.

In concert with all the lessons learned and skills gained through combat in Afghanistan, it is evident that the Soviets have accomplished one thing––they have gained strategically important new airfields from which they can operate. Whether the Soviets transplant any of their specific tactics to future theaters of operations is still a matter of conjecture, but the basic warfighting principles that guide the Soviets remain intact––mass, shock, surprise, and willingness to apply any of the conventional weapons in their military arsenal.

Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Notes

1. Jiri Valenta, "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Crossroads, Spring 1980, p. 67.

2. Lawrence E. Grinter, "The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: Its Inevitability and Its Consequences," Parameters, December 1982, p. 58.

3. Kenneth Allard, "Soviet Airborne Forces and Preemptive Power Projection," Parameters, December 1980, p. 46.

4. Yossef Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," World Affairs, Winter 1982/83, p. 291.

5. David Isby, "Soviets in Afghanistan, Prepared for the Long Haul," Defense Week, 21 February 1984, p. 14.

6. Ibid.

7. Denis Warner, "The Soviet Union's 'International Duty' in Afghanistan," Pacific Defence Reporter, March 1983, p. 47.

8. Ibid.

9. David C. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," Soldier of Fortune, April 1981, pp. 44-45.

10. Ibid., p. 44.

11. Jim Coyne, "Afghanistan Update, Russians Lose Battles But May Win War," Soldier of Fortune, December 1982, p. 72.

12. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 44.

13. David C. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," Jane's Defence Weekly, vol. 4, no. 7, 1983, p. 683.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Jere Van Dyk, "Journey through Afghanistan," New York Times Magazine, 17 October 1982, p. 47.

18. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 4.

19. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

20. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," pp. 44-45.

21. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

22. John Gunston, "Afghans Plan USSR Terror Attacks," Jane's Defence Weekly, 31 March 1984, p. 481.

23. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 44.

24. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

25. "Update: Russia's 'Hidden' War in Afghanistan," U.S. News and World Report, 1 August 1983, p. 22.

26. Philip Jacobson, "The Red Army Learns from a Real War," Washington Post, 13 February 1983, p. 1; Borje Almquist, "Eyewitness to Afghanistan at War," World Affairs, Winter 1982-83, p. 312; Harold Johnson, "Soviets Cultivate Scorched Afghan Earth," Washington Times, 12 January 1984, p. 1C.

27. Jane's All the World's Aircraft 1983-84 (New York: Jane's), p. 216.

28. Charles Dunbar, "Inside Wartime Kabul," Asia, November/ December 1983, p. 27.

29. James H. Hansen, "Afghanistan: The Soviet Experience," National Defence, January 1982, pp. 23-24.

30. Ibid.

31. Coyne, p. 72.

32. "Su-25 Operating in Afghanistan," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 3 January 1983, pp. 12-13.

33. Yossef Bodansky, "Most Feared Aircraft in Afghanistan is Frogfoot," Jane's Defence Weekly, 19 May 1984. p. 768.

34. Jane's All the World's Aircraft, pp. 235-36.

35. Isby, "Soviets in Afghanistan, Prepared for the Long Haul," p. 14.

36. Fred Hiatt, "Soviets Use Bombers in Afghanistan," Washington Post, 24 April 1984, p. Al.

37. Fred Hiatt, "Soviet Troops Advance into Key Afghan Valley," Washington Post, 27 April 1984, p. A19.

38. Hiatt, "Soviets Use Bombers in Afghanistan," p. Al.

39. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," p. 286.

40. The Review of the NEWS, 24 November 1982, p. 64.

41. Joseph J. Collins, "The Soviet-Afghan War: The First Four Years," Parameters, Summer 1984, p. 52.

42. Associated Press, "Use of Deadly Air Bombs Reported in Afghanistan," New York Times, 24 May 1984, p. A5.

43. James C. Bussert, "Signal Troops Central to Soviet Afghanistan Invasion," Defense Electronics, June 1983, p. 104.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 107.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., pp. 107-08.

50. Ibid.. p. 108.

51. Ibid.

52. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," p. 279.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., p. 280.

55. "Afghanistan Three Years Later: More U.S. Help Needed," The Backgrounder, 27 December 1982, p. 11.

56. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan." p. 280.

57. Ibid., p. 287.

58. Bussert, p. 108.

Contributor

Lieutenant Colonel Denny R. Nelson (B.S., Oklahoma State University; M.A., Webster University) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, Hq Air University. He has had worldwide F-4 assignments and a staff assignment in DCS/Personnel at Tactical Air Command. Colonel Nelson, a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College, is a previous contributor to the Review.


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## archade (Sep 13, 2009)

*german and austrian legionaires in vietminh army*

Heinz Schütte. Zwischen den Fronten: Deutsche und österreichische Überläufer zum Viet Minh. Berlin Logos Verlag Berlin, 2006. 371 pp., ISBN 978-3-8325-1312-2.


The Difficulties of Becoming Vietnamese

In Zwischen den Fronten, Heinz Schütte tells the fascinating story of three men—Austrian Ernst Frey and Germans Rudy Schröder and Erwin Borchers—who defected from the French Foreign Legion to fight with the Viet Minh under the names Nguyen Dan, Le Duc Nhan and Chien Si in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The biographies of the three men set them apart from the more than one thousand other deserters from the Foreign Legion during the First Indochina War (1946-54). While the typical deserter after 1945 was a German who had fought most recently for Adolf Hitler and deserted out of fatigue, Schütte’s protagonists were political exiles who had joined the Legion in 1940 in hopes of fighting against Germany and defected to the Viet Minh out of sincere dedication to the anticolonial cause. In retracing the route of three men from exile to the Foreign Legion to the Viet Minh and back to postwar Europe, Schütte provides a novel perspective on both the predicaments of direct European participation in anticolonial struggle and the international repercussions of the Second World War.

While Frey, Schröder and Borchers all hoped to fight Nazis in the Foreign Legion, none set out to help the Vietnamese win their independence. All three were German-speaking communists (two from Germany, one from Austria) who fled persecution in what they called “Hitler-Deutschland” in the 1930s to take refuge in France. Their proximate reasons for joining the Foreign Legion differed: Schröder hoped it would mean clemency for his interned wife and young son; Borchers had been rejected from the regular French Army because his (French) mother had married a German; and Frey was homeless and destitute. Their tactical alliance with the French in order to fight the Nazis turned on them when France came under German control and occupation in 1940. Having been shipped from Paris to North Africa, the three would-be antifascists now discovered themselves fighting on the side of their worst enemy.

To their good fortune, the Foreign Legion transferred all three to Indochina. Frey hoped that British forces would intercept the transport and he would have a chance to defect and take up the anti-Nazi fight alongside the English. After reaching Indochina without incident, the group founded an anti-Legion cell within their troop, adding an anarchist from Berlin and an athletic former member of the International Brigades from Austria. These five formed a cross-country team as a ruse, talking tactics on their training runs and attempting contact with potential recruits at track meets. Eventually, they made contact with a leader of the French Resistance in Indochina, who in turn connected them to representatives of the Viet Minh. After the defeat of the French, the imprisonment of the three as POWs, and the fall of the Japanese, the Viet Minh pulled the cell members from prison and welcomed them as allies. Viet Minh leaders commissioned them with writing propaganda to encourage defections from the Foreign Legion, and gave Frey, who had received officer’s training in North Africa, control over troops. They gave Schröder the task of creating a counter-Foreign Legion of European defectors, naming it the “Tell Regiment” after medieval Swiss anti-imperialist and legendary marksman William Tell.

The details of the three defectors’ stories are dense and startling. Schütte embraces the drama of their lives, weaving his own story into theirs by beginning the book with a lengthy account of the coincidences and chance encounters that led him to the project. The introduction sets the tone of the book, which is largely biographical and intent on reassembling the lives of its three subjects, a task made considerably easier by the thick memoirs that two of them left when they died. Beyond a limited number of interviews with former Vietnamese leaders and some use of the East German state archives, little corroborating documentary evidence survives, a fact that amplifies the literary quality of the narrative. In their memoirs, Schröder and Frey used literary (and frequently religious) tropes of sacrifice and redemption, and often return to the transition from the ecstasy of collective action to the suffering of the individual body. Schütte reinforces that literary tone and structure, titling consecutive chapters “The Time of Expectation,” “The Time of Disillusionment,” and (after a German idiomatic expression) “The Moor Has Performed his Duty: Return to the Unknown Old World.” Schütte’s choice of style, though usually effective, occasionally tips over into the affected. When he ruminates on writing and the status of the “border-crosser” in the introduction, he only narrowly avoids turning the three defectors into metaphors, an impulse inconsistent with the care with which he has reconstructed their lives.

Schütte’s analysis is sharpest when he works with the points that arise organically from the material. The central question with which the defectors wrestle is the dynamic between internationalism and nationalism. The radical disidentification of all three men with their own nations had attracted them to the Vietnamese cause from which, as Schütte writes, “they expected the universal values” abandoned by their own countries (p. 320). Frey, who was Jewish by birth but non-practicing, wrote starkly of the experience of estrangement from his own country: “as I saw my compatriots enter Nazi camps en masse in March 1938 and the way my wisp of a mother was seized by SA men to clean the sidewalks with a toothbrush, my connection to Austria vanished with a single blow. After 1945 [and the defection to the Viet Minh] I had found a new fatherland” (p. 282). Schröder, a protégé of Raymond Aron and frequent contributor to the journal of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research during his exile years in Paris, dreamt of a new form of community even before arriving in Indochina, writing to his wife in 1940 about his aspirations for “a universal-human, non-state existence” (p. 261).

Yet the defectors’ enthusiasm for the revolutionary community blinded them to the fact that the role they were intended to play in anticolonial struggle was, in part, to campaign for their own obsolescence. The goal of the revolutionary forces was to enable a previously dominated nation to begin making its own history, not to have Europeans continue making it for them. In believing they had accomplished a leap into pure internationalism, the defectors misapprehended the nature of belonging in postcolonial Vietnam, where the Vietnamese revolutionaries saw leadership positions as best occupied by Vietnamese. Though useful to the Viet Minh for a while, the European defectors became redundant after 1950, when the victorious Chinese Communist Party offered a ready source of foreign advisers. A long-standing suspicion of European defectors and their motivations led the Vietnamese to demote those who had been given responsibilities, like Schröder and Frey, and to begin the process of deporting the rest. By 1951, with only a few exceptions (one of whom was Borchers, who stayed in the country with his Vietnamese wife and family until 1966), the European defectors had returned to Europe.

The demotion came as a blow to these three, even though their zeal had not extended to learning anything beyond rudimentary Vietnamese, in Frey’s case, or any at all, in Schröder’s. When the Viet Minh removed them from meaningful positions in 1950, Frey and Schröder experienced existential crises. After a religious epiphany, Frey attempted a pilgrimage through the jungle in a feverish state, intent on convincing General Vo Nguyen Giap of the existence of God. For Schröder, the crisis was philosophical; his wife had sent him a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s recently published Being and Nothingness (1943), which greatly affected him as he read it in underfed isolation and plagued by chronic illness.

Skeptical of what he saw as the beginnings of restrictive groupthink in the Viet Minh leadership, Schröder had concluded by 1951 that the path to collaboration between western and Vietnamese political actors remained barred for material reasons. Months before his voluntary departure from Vietnam in 1951, he asked how Europeans would overcome their “necessary overcompensation” and Vietnamese their “inferiority complex,” considering “20 million Vietnamese could not be subjected to psychoanalysis” (p. 259). He answered: “Allow three consecutive generations to eat until they are full” (p. 259).

Schütte mentions Martiniquan psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon only in passing, but the relevance of his work to Schütte’s subject would have borne more consideration. In seeing a material basis for the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Europeans and Vietnamese, Schröder produced a kind of basic-needs version of Fanon: instead of the moment of violence, the experience of satiety becomes the route out of the psychological distortions of colonialism. The defectors’ experiences of humiliation and their desire for psychological release in post-independence Vietnam present a model of liberation that refracts Fanon’s insights at an oblique angle. Pariahs in their own insurgent Vietnam, only to be expelled again. At the end of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon calls for the creation of a “new man,” an expression usually read as an asymptotic and possibly messianic goal. In Schütte’s book, however, the lives of the three defectors suggest provocatively that perhaps the new man, or rather, the new human, is created occasionally for brief periods of time in moments of political euphoria, and then is snuffed out again. Schütte’s monograph makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing study of the oscillations between internationalist and nationalist forms of political imagination in action.
_________________


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## archade (Nov 27, 2009)

James Sanders.  *Apartheid's Friends: The Rise and Fall of the South  African Secret Services.*  London  John Murray, 2006.  539 pp.  , ISBN 978-0-7195-6675-2.  Reviewed by Derek Catsam (University of Texas of the Permian Basin) Published on H-SAfrica (November, 2009) Commissioned by Lindsay F. Braun  Uncovering Hidden Histories  It is difficult to write histories of people who do not want their  stories to be told. It is even more difficult to write histories of  people whose job it was to keep their stories hidden, to misdirect  observers to believe that the story is something else, and to keep  those stories quiet by any necessary means, including enforcing  silence by killing.    These are the barriers inherent in writing the history of  intelligence agencies. South Africa's intelligence services after  1948 had more reason than most to keep their stories silent.  Apartheid made South Africa a polecat among nations, and by the end  of the National Party's reign South Africa was a pariah state even  among countries that were hardly squeamish about getting their hands  dirty with the more nefarious elements of statecraft. When the  American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain's MI5 and MI6  think that your methods are contemptible, your methods are probably  beyond contemptible.   James Sanders faces these challenges admirably in his ambitious,  richly detailed, and sometimes flawed (but always interestingly so)  book _Apartheid's Friends_. Sanders takes as his mission a  comprehensive treatment of what ends up as a relatively amorphous  concept--South Africa's intelligence services, or, as his subtitle  indicates, South Africa's Secret Service, a term perhaps more  problematic than Sanders recognizes inasmuch as Sanders throughout  the book does not define precisely what qualifies, and, indeed, is  unclear as to just what fits within his ambit (and thus what does  not).   >From the outset, South Africa looked to Great Britain and the United  States in setting up its own intelligence services. In the early Cold  War world, it was clear that discovering the secrets of others and  coveting the secrets of one's own would be a crucial factor in  international relations. The Western powers had to bring their  nascent intelligence services to maturity quickly, and they were  happy to welcome South Africa within their penumbral shadow. The  National Party's securocrats were more than willing to exploit the  Cold War, both its legitimate concerns and its paranoia, in order to  garner the support of Washington and Westminster. But while the  United States and the United Kingdom were happy to help, they also  saw South Africa as fertile terrain for competition. As the years  progressed, both would compete for Pretoria's favor, with each  gaining the upper hand for years at a time before the other managed  to take the advantage.   South Africa's intelligence services had the myriad responsibilities  of any nation's cloak-and-dagger organizations, but one  responsibility was first and foremost: protecting Apartheid from the  supposed onslaught from within and without that was always supposed  to be just around the corner. Naturally this creates a fine  atmosphere for storytelling, and Sanders chases just about every  anecdote, story, rumor, and legend. And with all of the mysterious  figures who are central to the history of South African intelligence  and the equally quirky, frightening, enchanting, addled, and  messianic figures who flit in and out of the story, Sanders is able  to conjure his inner Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. How could he not?  The main spying agency for most of the Apartheid era was known by the  ominous name of BOSS (though the organization was the Bureau FOR  State Security, journalists and others transmogrified it into the  Bureau OF State Security, much to the chagrin of the state). Among  his cast of characters are legendary names in the South African  intelligence world, such as Hendrik van den Bergh and Eschel Roodie,  General P. W. van der Westhuizen and Neil Bernard, Gerard Ludi and  Craig Williamson, and Mike Louw and Wouter Basson. There are also the  members of the police forces, such as Dirk Coetzee and Eugene de Kock  (nicknamed "Prime Evil") and Gideon Nieuwoudt ("The Angel of Death").  And as in any great spy story, there are the opposing agents.  Sanders's book is largely about the Apartheid spy hierarchy, but he  also devotes considerable space to the intelligence apparatus of the  African National Congress (ANC) opposition, including such figures as  Mo Shaik and Mac Maharaj. Sanders has plenty of anecdotes, though at  times it seems that the anecdotes serve no larger purpose except that  they are such good stories he could not possibly exclude them. Taken  in toto the many tales of intrigue that Sanders tells creates an  exhaustive picture of South African intelligence, but there are times  when it appears that he is trying to draw a 1:1 scale map of the  South African spying universe, and so it can be an exhausting picture  as well. But in the end the accumulation of stories reaffirms that  the Byzantine intelligence forces existed to bolster white supremacy,  and their means of doing so were grim, seedy, and at times murderous.     But even amid the dark and dangerous and foreboding tales, Sanders is  adept at revealing that for all of the menace, and for all of the  capacity to destroy the lives of black activists and other  capriciously labeled enemies of the state, there was also a keystone  cops element at work in the intelligence agencies during the  Apartheid years. The intelligence services and the organizations that  buttressed them could be scary, deadly, and effective. They could  also be comically ineffective and corrupt. Buffoonery seemed to  characterize the South African intelligence services as much as  skullduggery. Furthermore, South Africa's intelligence services were  almost always caught up in internecine struggles. The biggest of  these conflicts took place between the intelligence services of the  government--BOSS and the National Intelligence Service (NIS)--and the  Military Intelligence Division (MID). Intelligence thus became  contested territory, where prestige and access were often more  important than doing the actual work of the state.     In at least one instance, the incompetence and ham-handedness of the  intelligence services and their deep connections with the government  led to a scandal that nearly brought down the government. In the  1970s, Information Minister Connie Mulder and Secretary for  Information Eschel Roodie convinced Prime Minister John Vorster to  plant pro-government information in South African publications, and  most notably to establish the pro-Apartheid English-language  newspaper the _Citizen_. When the news of the propaganda campaign  leaked, the main participants tried to cover their tracks. Ultimately  the Information Scandal, or Muldergate as it came to be known for its  proximity and loose similarity to the Watergate scandal in the United  States, directly led to the resignation of Vorster as prime minister  and state president and certainly cost Mulder any shot at becoming  premier, a position that went to P. W. Botha. Sanders's treatment of  the Information Scandal represents one of the strongest contributions  of his book.   Botha certainly did not learn from Muldergate the lessons of curbing  the use of the intelligence services. If anything, during the 1980s,  the interconnections between the security forces and the intelligence  services became so blurred as to be indiscernible. Police operations,  already dependent on secrecy, increasingly utilized the state  intelligence apparatus. At the same time, pressure from within came  in the form of a renewed anti-Apartheid struggle that sought to  render South Africa ungovernable, and increasing pressure from  without took the form of global condemnation and divestment. Both  brought greater scrutiny to all of the actions of the Apartheid  state.   The transition to multiracial rule in South Africa did not end, and  in some ways actually escalated, the sense of urgency in the  intelligence services. There were efforts to undermine the  negotiations. But there was also a great deal of self-serving  behavior as members of the intelligence apparatus sought either to  ensure their own positions in a new government or to find space  within the public sector.   After the eventual transition, the question became how to create an  effective South African intelligence service free of the burdens of  the past but capable of learning its lessons, in order to allow the  ANC-led government to maintain the sort of intelligence gathering  that any prominent state requires in an international diplomatic  climate where gentlemen do read each other's mail. This effort  included integrating former ANC intelligence and military operatives  into the existing intelligence services, a transition that was not  always easy and was made considerably more difficult by the fact that  former operatives suddenly looked on the past as a golden age that  the new dispensation could never equal, a largely ahistorical view  that nonetheless allowed critics to maintain their racial and  political views. This is not to say that the ANC government's  intelligence efforts were always sterling. The growing pains in the  intelligence agencies have been every bit as tender as those in other  realms of the New South Africa.   An additional factor that the National Party government rarely had to  deal with was the rise of private security companies, many of which  include intelligence operations within their ambit. The 1990s were an  especially fruitful time for such organizations to emerge, which was  a sometimes worrisome trend given that these mercenaries were not  even nominally under the control of the government, could and would  sell out to the highest bidder, and sometimes made overtures about  trying to overthrow various governments, South Africa's included. In  one well-known case, members of these private security services tried  to stage a coup in 2004 against the government of Equatorial Guinea.  The two main players in this largely farcical--but no less  frightening--effort were Simon Mann, whose grandfather ran De Beers  and who had been associated with the most far-reaching of the private  "counterintelligence consultancy firms," Executive Outcomes, and Mark  Thatcher, the son of the former British prime minister. The effort  failed, but the threat that such renegade operations could pose  became all the more clear.   The greatest source of strength in _Apartheid's Friends_ is the  incredible level of detail Sanders brings to his work. But that  source of strength might also be the book's greatest weakness. There  may well be too much detail, and especially too much detail in areas  in which the connection with intelligence is dubious or at least  unclear. South Africa during the decades after 1948 and until 1994  was a police state, and as a result, intelligence seemed to play a  role in every element of daily life. Nonetheless, there are occasions  when the level of detail causes Sanders somewhat to lose the plot.  All but the most dedicated and knowledgeable readers will  occasionally find themselves lost in a morass of names and  organizations and events that do not always seem all that germane to  the book's central themes. Security forces required intelligence, to  be sure, but one wonders whether a tighter and perhaps more  disciplined narrative might have improved the book.   Around the turn of the current century, Jacob Zuma, once head of the  ANC's intelligence wing, was caught up in a potentially explosive  scandal in which he was accused of being part of a cabal within the  ANC that was trying to stage a coup against President Thabo Mbeki. A  dubious report that tried to bring the alleged conspiracy to light  referred to Zuma's "legendary laziness and incompetence" and asserted  that ANC intelligence had been compromised as far back as the  mid-1980s (p. 393). Zuma, who had legendary clashes with Mbeki that  resulted in Zuma wresting the ANC party presidency from Mbeki at the  ANC's meeting at Polokwane in December 2007, is now president of  South Africa. He is therefore ultimately responsible for intelligence  today. He could do worse than to read Sanders's _Apartheid's Friends_  to get a sense of just what he is in for.


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## archade (Dec 2, 2009)

Charles A. Krohn.* Lost Battalion of Tet: The Breakout of 2/12th Cavalry at Hue*. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008. 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-59114-434-2.

Reviewed by Allen Reece
Published on H-War (October, 2009)


The Lessons Never Grow Old

Readers will enjoy this book by Charles Krohn, whose experiences as the intelligence officer for the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment (2/12th) during the Tet Offensive of 1968 provides the foundation for the work. Lost Battalion of Tet reveals an army unit’s struggles preparing for an impending battle. The author's first-hand account provides a tale of bravery that captures the reader’s imagination. Additionally, Krohn does a good job of identifying lessons learned that are based on his observations--lessons on the value of training, intelligence preparation of the battlefield, and planning. Each has solidified and improved our current doctrine. Charles Krohn is now on the staff of the American Battle Monuments Commission in Arlington, Virginia.

First published by Praeger Publishers in 1993, the original included statistics that many readers questioned. This revised version corrects the first edition with two new appendices containing the names of the men killed in action, and those receiving the Distinguished Service Cross. Of special note, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Leroy Gregory, the replacement commander for Lieutenant Colonel M. Collier Ross, is listed in both appendices.   

The 2/12th Cavalry, typical of most cavalry units, was a hard-training organization that demonstrated discipline under extreme conditions.  Motivating men to maintain a vigil for an event that might or might not occur is one of the military's great leadership challenges. The troops of the 2/12th were constantly improving their positions on the ground, and rehearsing procedures to ensure the highest standards when it came time for action. Gregory instilled this type of discipline into the men of the 2/12th Cavalry, enabling a strong and effective defense against the Tet Offensive. In addition to defensive operations, U.S. forces learned that when conducting search-and-destroy missions, it was critical to have artillery support because they could be ambushed at any time. Training with, and using artillery properly, can balance a fight. Krohn supports this point through his recollection of a platoon from C Company that used artillery to keep a numerically superior force from overrunning their positions until they could disengage. 

Intelligence gathering was Krohn’s business. As the intelligence officer for the 2/12th, he had the task of getting inside the enemy’s decision cycle. Intelligence is a combat multiplier, and intelligence preparation of the battlefield is a critical part of the commander’s ability to visualize an impending combat action. Krohn illuminates this with information obtained from senior North Vietnamese army officers killed just prior to the beginning of Tet. This information allowed the battalion commander better to prepare his defenses for the impending attack, thus saving the lives of many of the soldiers involved in the operation.  

Krohn points out a serious miscalculation by the United States concerning the enemy's tenacity. In many cases, U.S. forces did not view the North Vietnamese army as formidable. Therefore, commanders made mistakes in employing forces against an enemy who was extremely patient and dedicated. It is critical for planners to remember that war against an experienced enemy who is fighting on their own ground, without in-depth study of their culture as part of the planning process, can end badly. Reflecting on the past, Krohn concludes that arrogance and lack of respect for one's enemy is a shortcoming that can lead to protracted war.

From the early days of warfare, armies realized that they must sustain operations, whether while training, deploying, or in combat. Early in the book, Krohn discusses the abundance of equipment available to combat forces in Vietnam, and how quickly replacement equipment was provided. None of that, however, mattered if the plan for sustainment was not nested with the combat operation. One such concern developed as the 2/12th was preparing to move from Landing Zone Ross to Camp Evans. The unit lacked confidence that ammunition, along with other supplies, would be on the ground at the battalion’s new destination. Upon arrival, the 2/12th found that there was, in fact, no ammunition. Moreover, an overall poor movement plan for the entire division from Camp Evans to the north proved very dangerous. The lesson that Krohn illustrates is the importance of planning all aspects of an operation, and the role the commander must play to ensure trust between units in contact, and units sustaining the operation. The best way for this to occur is through planning, coordination, and proper execution.

In summary, Charles Krohn provides an accounting of the  actions of the 2/12th Cavalry during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Krohn reinforces the lessons provided by the 2/12th's experience during Tet. First, train the force. There is no substitute for disciplined training focusing on the fundamentals that aid in survival. Second, the ability to take information from the battlefield and interpret it in a manner that allows the commander the ability to make decisions through visualization is a true combat multiplier. Finally, planning  all aspects of an operation is vital for success, whether at the tactical or strategic level. Any young officer can learn valuable lessons from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry's experience.


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## archade (Dec 2, 2009)

Matthew H. Spring.* With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America*, 1775-1783. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. xxiii + 381 pp, ISBN 978-0-8061-3947-0.

Reviewed by Ian McCulloch (Canadian Forces College)


Zeal and Cold Steel

With the deftness and sureness of a bayonet stroke, British historian Matthew H. Spring's new book skewers the long-held, and largely Hollywood induced, portrayal of the British Army as a tactically inept force when faced by intrepid Patriots during the American War for Independence. Already a winner of the American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia's Thomas Fleming Book Award for the Outstanding Revolutionary War Era Book of 2008, I heartily recommend this book to all scholars, students, and enthusiasts of the period.

With Zeal and With Bayonets is, quite literally, a masterpiece of analysis, well researched, well argued, and well written. It is the first book I know of that truly captures the essence of the operational and tactical levels of war in the eighteenth century. Not only do I believe it to be an instant seminal classic, and required reading for any scholar contemplating writing campaign history or a battle monograph of the period in the future, but it is equally suitable as a case study on insurgency warfare for any modern day staff college pondering the challenges of conventional warfare versus asymmetric warfare. It is just that outstanding.

The book opens with a superb discussion and mission analysis of the strategic problems presented by the insurgency in America, and the three operational military objectives given to the British Army. The  three objectives were: to defeat and disperse the rebels' conventional military forces; to encourage the populace to cease supporting Congress's war effort, and even to transpose that support to the Crown; and finally, to induce the rebel leadership to give up the armed struggle in favor of a political settlement.

In his analysis, Spring shows clearly that British military leadership understood that it was paramount to neutralize the rebels' military forces either by kinetic or non-kinetic action in order to: reestablish control over American territory, persuade the rebel leadership to abandon the goal of independence in favor of a negotiated political settlement, and encourage the colonial population at large to withdraw its support for the rebellion. The center of gravity was thus assessed to be overwhelming military success against the Continental Army. If the source of the insurgency's military power could be neutralized or destroyed, it was believed that all the operational objectives could be easily achieved and strategic victory assured.

Spring then examines a number of operational constraints that were imposed externally or inherent in the nature of the insurgency, thus limiting the operational capabilities of the British Army in its quest to bring the elusive Continental and militia troops to battle. Spring identifies five key factors that "made it extraordinarily difficult for British commanders in America to secure the kind of battlefield engagement in which they sought to neutralize the rebels' military forces" (p. 48). Each can be tied directly back to one, or all three, of the operational objectives.

First, the British had to cautiously avoid being beaten in tactical engagements by the rebels early on in the insurgency in order to avoid the operational effect of giving the rebel cause hope, and galvanizing recruitment and popular support. Second, their limited manpower resources prevented them from exposing their troops unnecessarily to extensive campaign hardships or wasteful attritional battles with frontal style tactics. Third, logistical considerations (particularly their dependence on the Royal Navy to supply them from water and efficient land convoys) in Spring's own words, "grievously limited their field armies' mobility" (p. 48). Fourth, the British Army had an inadequate intelligence picture with which to prosecute effective operations. That is, there were few accurate topographical maps, and obtaining accurate information on enemy movements and dispositions from a primarily hostile population was practically insurmountable. Finally, the terrain (the all important ground) was rugged and underdeveloped, with limited road systems. It favored the defense, and thus enabled rebel defenders to pick their ground, and to shun unwanted major decisive engagements.

Spring has fascinating follow-on chapters dealing with grand tactics, march and deployment, the advance, detailed discussions of morale and motivation, battalion command, firepower, the psychology of the bayonet charge, and the complexities of bush-fighting. Among the many interesting themes of this study to emerge is Spring's description of the almost Darwinian approach of Britain's "American Army" to adapt and evolve in order to survive the North American environment and fight the rebels on their own terms. For example, light infantry and bush-fighting skills that had been developed and refined by the British during the Seven Years' War were all but lost when these elite troops (best suited to act as a potent gendermarie on the fringes of a wild and unpredictable frontier) were disbanded.

By the middle of the war, however, the in-theater British light infantry had reinvented itself and, along with light cavalry, had become the equal or betters of the American sharpshooters and mounted infantry. Major General John F.C. Fuller wrote that "during the last three years of [the Revolution] the English had so well adapted themselves to its nature, that they were in no way inferior to their opponents."[1] Despite both sides developing a good light infantry capability, by contrast it was George Washington's Continental Army, assisted by French troops and the French Navy using standard European tactics and siege warfare of the day, that finally defeated the British Army strategically in North America.

To a large extent, the British tactical system of the 1770s, which conventionally favored mass and concentrated firepower in a European context, was replaced in America with an ad hoc system that emphasized maneuver and speed. While the credo of the modern infantry today remains "to close with and destroy the enemy," it could be said that such a maxim historically stems from the eighteenth-century tactical experience of the Redcoat in North America. Spring contends that the British Army's "American" attack doctrine stressed the indirect approach--maneuvering onto a flank and attacking with "zeal" and "cold steel"--rather than relying on the old stand-by of wearing down one's opponent with heavy volleys of fire until one side gave way. By utilizing open order formations, and crossing the last lethal fifty yards at the double, the British quickly found they could minimize casualties from an adversary who was usually covered by strong defensive positions, and particularly well entrenched. This type of agile maneuver, however, required highly fit, highly motivated, and well-trained men led by bright, dynamic leaders.

Using a wealth of primary sources, Spring shows us that indeed this was the case, his narrative studded with firsthand accounts of the British soldiery, officers and other ranks, that experienced the face of battle in tracts of forest-bordered fields or hilly terrain. The methods they devised to maximize their combat power and minimize casualties were honed to such a point that sometimes elite troops, such as light infantry and grenadier battalions, were the only portion of the main British force to engage the enemy before he gave way. Colonel David Dundas, writing a few years after the war, cautioned that the "loose and irregular system of [British] infantry" was only possible because of "the very small proportion of cavalry employed in the American wars."[2] If the Americans had had heavy cavalry typical of the European theater of war, the British, he acknowledged, would have been forced to move with more "concert and circumspection" (p. 138).

This ad hoc tactical system specific to America worked well initially, but typically, the rebels would choose the ground on which they were willing to fight, and would always have a secure escape route. Despite many tactical victories, the British Army in America was never able to engage decisively the American rebel forces, or effectively pursue them to prevent them from reforming and returning to the fray. This was an operational failure. By 1781, the Americans had perfected their own tactical system, which saw them protecting their flanks, and echeloning their firepower in depth in order to absorb and blunt the shock and "zeal" of the British troops. By the end of the war, the Continental Army's best soldiers could meet the king's regiments on the open battlefield on more or less equal terms. 

This final tactical stalemate imposed on British field commanders soon had an impact on their operational constraint of minimizing casualties (manpower) and, coupled with the constraints they consistently faced with regard to operational level logistics and their limited intelligence capabilities, negated any chance British leaders ever had of achieving any of their operational objectives.

Simply stated, Spring's work is a tour de force with wide appeal to specialists, students, academics, and the general public alike. He is to be commended for producing what I think is, hands down, the finest and most fascinating study of the tactical evolution of the British Army during the American War of Independence to date. It is just that outstanding. If only another author would now commit to do the same thing for George Washington's Continental Army, explaining how it campaigned operationally in the field, better military history for this important insurgency of the  eighteenth century would abound!

Notes

[1]. John F. C. Fuller, British Light Infantry in the Eighteenth Century (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1925), 127-128.

[2]. Colonel David Dundas, Principles of Military Movements, Chiefly Applied to Infantry (London: T. Cadell, 1788), 12.


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## archade (Feb 7, 2010)

H.P. Willmott.  The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War.  Revised edition. Dulles  Potomac Books, 2008.  xiv + 505 pp., ISBN 978-1-59797-191-1.

Debunking of Myths?

The first edition of The Great Crusade (1989) was a fine, comprehensive, single-volume history of World War II. The revised edition is even better, though readers should be aware that this is a military history of the war that usually focuses on decision-making and activities at the operational level and above. The author sometimes speaks of individual fighting divisions, but almost never about individual soldiers. This work is thus not the place for the reader to discover the tales and yarns of individual soldiers. Those who hope to grasp what it was like to be a Marine storming the beach at Tarawa, or a German civilian in Dresden in February 1945, should look elsewhere. H.P. Willmott gives considerable attention to the broad political and economic motives of warring countries and ample time to the analysis of the thinking behind major military decisions. Nevertheless, individuals who view history through the lens of the trinity of race, class, and gender will also emerge disappointed. Race is considered as it applies to the Holocaust, German and Japanese expansion, and the occupation policies of those countries. But, class and gender hardly rate a mention. The bottom line: The Great Crusade is not a social history of the war. Similarly, Willmott makes no attempt to replicate the anecdotes and stories that leaven the contributions of historians such as John Keegan, or his one-time student, Antony Beevor. His concern lies with the overall sweep of events and their import, not with individual reactions and stories. 

Willmott does have a few axes to grind, but he candidly enunciates them. He is critical of the "great men" theory of history; he believes it is important to provide the reader with a balance of perspectives held by the major participants and he states, "I must admit to a contempt for that popularly accepted by pernicious myth of German military excellence" (p. xi). He is not afraid to swim against the tide, either, especially in his analysis of the European theater. He takes issue with Gerhard Weinberg's view that the Russians deliberately halted on the outskirts of Warsaw in 1944, thereby condemning the Polish underground to destruction.[1] He argues that more German divisions (for example, those involved in the spring 1941 Balkans invasions) could not have been absorbed easily in the Germans' June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and hence would not have contributed to immediate increased German combat effectiveness. He opines that Germany's repulse in the Battle of Britain "had no effect upon Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union in 1941" (p. 110). 

The Great Crusade seldom minces words. Willmott describes Pearl Harbor, when all things are considered, as a Japanese defeat. In his view, the Wehrmacht was consistently outfought and out-thought from Stalingrad to the end of the war. He argues that Erich von Manstein's famous 1943 riposte to the Soviets at Kharkov has been overly praised. Bernard Montgomery's tactics often imitated those of the Soviets in their reliance upon numerical and firepower superiority. The RAF was on the edge of defeat after its costly March 1944 Nuremberg raid. A de facto truce between the Japanese and both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Xedong persisted for long periods of time in China. With similar bravado, the author states that the Union's blockade and strangling of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War is a direct analog to U.S. strategy vis-á-vis Japan in World War II. Japan and the United States both wished to end the war before the Soviets could enter, but couldn't get the job accomplished. Most of the war was fought after the outcome already had been determined. It is not possible to pick out a turning point in either the war in Europe, or in the Pacific. Such views (and there are many more) make this history both stimulating and sometimes challenging.

On occasion, Willmott offers conclusions that undermine his own position, as when he offers the judgment that the Wehrmacht exhibited "a technique, initiative and flair at both tactical and operational levels that enabled German ground formations to outfight consistently superior enemy forces--at least until 1944" (p. 136), even as he argues that German military excellence is a "pernicious myth" (p. xi). Apparently he discounts the work of Trevor N. DuPuy and others, which suggests that the typical German infantryman was approximately 25 percent more effective than the comparable British or American.[2] An apparent contradiction also emerges between his derogation of the "great men" thesis and his observation that "the European war outlasted its author by nine days" (p. 449). 

Given Willmott's thesis concerning the absence of real turning points in the war, it is not surprising that his coverage of critical battles such as Moscow, Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Kiev is lighter than one sees in other comprehensive histories. He also asserts that economic strength ultimately was the critical factor in deciding the war, but does not even mention the work of Mark Harrison or Adam Tooze in his bibliography.[3]

Given these decided stances and the problems that some readers may find with them, we should ask what the work does accomplish especially well. First, Willmott makes one think and rethink one's views about what really happened in the war and why events occurred as they did. Second, drawing on the pathbreaking work of David M. Glantz and others, he gives significant attention to Soviet war thinking and Soviet military maturation over the duration of the war. His is not the Germanocentric view of events that frequently has colored histories of World War II. Third, he does supply "critical balance" (p. xi) to the perspectives of the combatants. Fourth, he elucidates important, but otherwise obscure, events such as the compromising capture of the SS Automedon in November 1941 and the prophetic Total War Research Institute study of August 1941 performed by the Japanese. Fifth, Willmott often buttresses his conclusions with generous data, more so than any comparable comprehensive history. Sixth, depending upon their tastes, of course, readers may find attractive his penchant for stating his assessments forthrightly. He seldom hedges his conclusions with probabilistic statements or counterfactual possibilities. By contrast, in his well-received 1,178-page history of the war, Weinberg sometimes proffers the view that more research is needed on a topic before we can reach a definitive conclusion. 

I recommend The Great Crusade as a university textbook and I back this judgment by using it as my primary text when I teach a course on the history of World War II. True, Willmott serves up more than a few controversial points of view and he chooses not to cover several critical topics. Nevertheless, the book is highly readable, well documented, and provides an excellent springboard for discussion. Would that more prospective textbooks were able to fulfill the same criteria.       

Notes 

[1]. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

[2]. Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979). 

[3]. Harrison Mark, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006). 


Citation: James V. Koch. Review of Willmott, H.P., The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2010. URL:


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## archade (Feb 7, 2010)

Stephen M. Miller.  *Volunteers on the Veld: Britain's Citizen-Soldiers and the South African War, 1899-1902*.  Norman  University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.  xii + 236 pp.  , ISBN 978-0-8061-3864-0.

Reviewed by Anne Samson

An Irregular Take on the South African or Anglo-Boer War

Much has been published on the South African or Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, from descriptions of individual battles to general histories and the odd memoir, with most focusing on the period of conventional or set-piece battles. This short book breaks with the tradition by exploring the role of British volunteer or irregular troops, in particular the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers in the war. By implication, this moves the focus of the war to the period of guerrilla fighting and for someone brought up on both the British and South African myths of the war, this provides a refreshing and alternative insight. 

The book starts with a description of the little-known Battle of Tweebosch of 1902 in which Lord Methuen was defeated and where the volunteer forces failed to prove themselves. After setting out reasons for the battle's obscurity, one of which is that irregular troops were used, Miller turns to the purpose of this book, namely, that charting the recruitment and use of these volunteers to provides an insight into the changing British imperial attitude during the Victorian era. As he notes, "While the Regular Army has received great attention, Britain's 'citizen' army, the Yeomanry, Volunteers, and Militia, have been almost completely overlooked" (p. 7). The use of these volunteers during the South African War, particularly after Black Week in December 1899, is significant for two reasons. Firstly, in 1900, Britain was the only imperial power not to have conscription. This was influenced by the "Blue Water School," which maintained that the navy was sufficient to protect Britain and the empire, yet the war of 1899-1902 was to show otherwise. Secondly, an enquiry into the performance of the more than one hundred thousand volunteers in the war resulted in a radical change to the military structure in 1907, seeing the transformation of the volunteer forces into the Expeditionary or Territorial Force and later the Territorial Army. 

The first three chapters explore the origin of the irregular troops, the context in which they are sent to South Africa, and the issues surrounding their recruitment. Miller introduces many interesting aspects, such as the background to each of the three forces:, namely that the militia were recruited before 1850 as a counterbalance to the regular army and a possible dictatorship, whilst the yeomanry or mounted volunteers were recruited to suppress "riotous or tumultuous" Britons, and the volunteer movement enabled the middle class to participate politically and as a means of preventing conscription (p. 25). 

Although from the middle of the Victorian era the reputation of the military was declining, from the 1870s the attitude towards the irregulars was improving. Miller tries to explain this by describing how education, religion, and business all started to promote the benefits of empire and the military. Boys' brigades grew in popularity with the migration of people to the towns and cities to find employment and the increase in leisure time. In addition, the volunteer forces required little funding from the central treasury, which appealed to the politicians who were preparing the country for potential conflicts on the continent and elsewhere. Miller points out that although the civilian War Office seemed to control military decisions, the country's heroes in the late Victorian era were all soldiers, such as Field Marshall Garnet Wolseley, General Charles Gordon, Major General Henry Havelock, and Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Songs, literature, and newspapers all extolled the virtues of the military and martial values, a point further taken on board by the church and missionaries. Although raising some valid points, Miller does not dwell much on the reasons underlying the change in attitude, which is a pity. 

Miller goes onto explain the differences between the Boer and British troops, showing how evenly matched the two forces were and what weaknesses would play a role. The reluctance in Britain to prepare the military for action in southern Africa initially gave the Boers the upper hand, leading to what became known in Britain as "Black Week." The series of defeats during Black Week takes on greater significance when the reasons for British confidence in victory are set out, such as access to more sophisticated weapons and the presence of the engineering corps and specialist medical teams which the Boers did not have. Miller provides a breakdown of the number of troops available to each side, noting that Britain had approximately three times the number of troops to draw on than the Boers, despite the quality of some of the British troops, i.e., the volunteers and militia, not being up to standard, particularly in the area of leadership. Despite this shortcoming, many saw value in using volunteer troops and encouraged their recruitment. Unfortunately, the process of how this happened is a little vague as Miller sidetracks to home defense issues prior to 1899 and the unsuitability of the volunteer forces in their existing state for this purpose. 

A complex set of regulations appears to have dictated where and when irregulars could be used and with the events leading up to the war, these came to the fore. Miller provides a broad overview of why the War Office sanctioned the recruitment of the army irregulars and relative detail on the social composition of the different groups. He suggests that the War Office was not completely happy with the composition of the volunteers based on the areas they came from, but why this was perceived to be an issue is not fully explored. The main reasons why men volunteered centered on class and patriotism, although the revisionist economic explanation which arose during the 1960s also receives coverage. In setting out his arguments around recruitment, Miller has paid close attention to available statistics to prove his point and to highlight differences between regions and the three irregular forces. 

Chapters 4 through 6 focus on the experiences of the troops and make much use of memoirs and other personal accounts. Where little evidence exists, Miller puts it down to the commonness of the work and the proximity of the training bases to family and friends. Life on ship is accorded the same level of detail, with comments about the sighting of Los Palmas and Tenerife in particular. The time spent on board and in training was seen as important for building an esprit de corps which would be needed on the battlefield. The awareness of the officers in building this esprit, however, is juxtaposed by the accounts of what men were not trained or drilled in, such as putting up tents and hammocks. Special attention is also given to the time when the men realized what they had taken on: the moment of embarkation and the last sighting of UK territory. 

Unlike the majority of histories of the South African War, which tend to focus on the action, Miller is quite comfortable, albeit through the experiences of others, sharing the mundane and tedious side of the war. What becomes evident in chapter 5 is the infrequency with which the volunteers encountered the enemy and the drain this had on morale, especially when the men were not aware of the bigger picture. Other highlights include accounts of being under fire for the first time, the subordinate role of the volunteers on the battlefield when set pieces were fought and, again, the inadequacy of their preparation, such as not being able to saddle a horse. Special attention is given to the City of London Imperial Volunteers (CIV) throughout the book which perhaps is of no great surprise considering that much was written about them at the time, too. The jealousies this gave rise to are also addressed in this book. 

In dealing with the men's experiences of the war, Miller addresses the transition from traditional warfare to guerrilla war, but rather than from the tactical point of view, he explores the impact this had on the troops as their function changed to one of guarding prisoners and railway lines, killing animals, and burning farms. Again, there are diversions to explore the attitude towards and role of Black South Africans, of which over 30,000 fought on the side of the British, and the death of a French aristocrat, Comte de Villebois-Marueil, who was fighting on the side of the Boers. Dominating the correspondence is the British hatred of the Boers, negativity towards the war, and the growing restlessness amongst the troops towards those in command. 

Chapter 7 sees a return to more traditional historical narrative with less use of memoir and diaries. The chapter is one of contrasts as Miller compares the different responses in the press to the send-off of the troops and the reception accorded their officers compared to that of the men. The chapter also deals with the pressure on the officers to return men home before the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed and the difficulty they faced in launching offensives with depleted forces, an example being that of Lord Methuen's column of thirteen hundred which was compiled of men from fourteen different units. The subsequent assessment of the auxiliaries and the tension faced between meeting the need for bodies on the battlefield versus training culminates in the defeat and capture of Lord Methuen at Tweebosch, with most blame being placed on the Imperial Yeomanry. Miller balances the criticisms with evidence of support for the irregulars, particularly for the yeomanry and again, the CIV. Although some of the auxiliaries did not perform as expected, the overall verdict regarding their contribution to the British victory is positive. Where the men failed, this was not due to their inadequacies but rather to a lack of training and organization. 

The final chapter looks at the years following the end of the war and the restructuring of the armed forces through three secretaries of state for war, namely William Broderick, Hugh Arnold-Foster, and Richard Haldane. The changes introduced by Haldane were the most far-reaching, with the introduction of the Expeditionary Force and the change in focus from India to the continent as the last line of defense. Various reports were produced following enquiries of which the most prominent were the Elgin and Norfolk Commissions into the role of the auxiliaries and around the issue of conscription. Although the commissions pointed to weaknesses and concerns in the performance of the auxiliary troops, it was felt that these inadequacies were more to do with the organization of the troops and the paucity of preparation and thus the outcome was of the utmost praise for the men who rose to the call in Britain's time of need. Interspersed in the chapter is a discussion on the poor health of the volunteers noting that approximately a quarter were rejected for various reasons. Despite giving some space to Sir Frederick Maurice's views on the matter, Miller turns to the overriding theme of the day, namely, why men did not volunteer and the debate on whether conscription should be introduced. 

This book is a valuable contribution to a war about which much has been written. In its attempt to reconcile the strategic or political approach with the experiences of the irregular troops, use has been made of personal and government sources, giving it appeal to a wider range of readers than would necessarily have been the case if only one aspect had been addressed. At times, it was a little difficult to follow the author's argument as he introduces asides and alternative explanations; however, this does not distract from the purpose of the book, which was to tell the story of the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers in the South African War of 1899-1902 and highlight the changing attitude towards the military during the late Victorian era. If anything, it serves to further highlight the complex feelings and attitudes towards war and its relationship with society and politics.


----------



## archade (Feb 7, 2010)

Stephen M. Miller. *Volunteers on the Veld: Britain's Citizen-Soldiers and the South African War, 1899-1902*. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. xii + 236 pp. , ISBN 978-0-8061-3864-0.

Reviewed by Anne Samson

An Irregular Take on the South African or Anglo-Boer War

Much has been published on the South African or Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, from descriptions of individual battles to general histories and the odd memoir, with most focusing on the period of conventional or set-piece battles. This short book breaks with the tradition by exploring the role of British volunteer or irregular troops, in particular the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers in the war. By implication, this moves the focus of the war to the period of guerrilla fighting and for someone brought up on both the British and South African myths of the war, this provides a refreshing and alternative insight. 

The book starts with a description of the little-known Battle of Tweebosch of 1902 in which Lord Methuen was defeated and where the volunteer forces failed to prove themselves. After setting out reasons for the battle's obscurity, one of which is that irregular troops were used, Miller turns to the purpose of this book, namely, that charting the recruitment and use of these volunteers to provides an insight into the changing British imperial attitude during the Victorian era. As he notes, "While the Regular Army has received great attention, Britain's 'citizen' army, the Yeomanry, Volunteers, and Militia, have been almost completely overlooked" (p. 7). The use of these volunteers during the South African War, particularly after Black Week in December 1899, is significant for two reasons. Firstly, in 1900, Britain was the only imperial power not to have conscription. This was influenced by the "Blue Water School," which maintained that the navy was sufficient to protect Britain and the empire, yet the war of 1899-1902 was to show otherwise. Secondly, an enquiry into the performance of the more than one hundred thousand volunteers in the war resulted in a radical change to the military structure in 1907, seeing the transformation of the volunteer forces into the Expeditionary or Territorial Force and later the Territorial Army. 

The first three chapters explore the origin of the irregular troops, the context in which they are sent to South Africa, and the issues surrounding their recruitment. Miller introduces many interesting aspects, such as the background to each of the three forces:, namely that the militia were recruited before 1850 as a counterbalance to the regular army and a possible dictatorship, whilst the yeomanry or mounted volunteers were recruited to suppress "riotous or tumultuous" Britons, and the volunteer movement enabled the middle class to participate politically and as a means of preventing conscription (p. 25). 

Although from the middle of the Victorian era the reputation of the military was declining, from the 1870s the attitude towards the irregulars was improving. Miller tries to explain this by describing how education, religion, and business all started to promote the benefits of empire and the military. Boys' brigades grew in popularity with the migration of people to the towns and cities to find employment and the increase in leisure time. In addition, the volunteer forces required little funding from the central treasury, which appealed to the politicians who were preparing the country for potential conflicts on the continent and elsewhere. Miller points out that although the civilian War Office seemed to control military decisions, the country's heroes in the late Victorian era were all soldiers, such as Field Marshall Garnet Wolseley, General Charles Gordon, Major General Henry Havelock, and Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Songs, literature, and newspapers all extolled the virtues of the military and martial values, a point further taken on board by the church and missionaries. Although raising some valid points, Miller does not dwell much on the reasons underlying the change in attitude, which is a pity. 

Miller goes onto explain the differences between the Boer and British troops, showing how evenly matched the two forces were and what weaknesses would play a role. The reluctance in Britain to prepare the military for action in southern Africa initially gave the Boers the upper hand, leading to what became known in Britain as "Black Week." The series of defeats during Black Week takes on greater significance when the reasons for British confidence in victory are set out, such as access to more sophisticated weapons and the presence of the engineering corps and specialist medical teams which the Boers did not have. Miller provides a breakdown of the number of troops available to each side, noting that Britain had approximately three times the number of troops to draw on than the Boers, despite the quality of some of the British troops, i.e., the volunteers and militia, not being up to standard, particularly in the area of leadership. Despite this shortcoming, many saw value in using volunteer troops and encouraged their recruitment. Unfortunately, the process of how this happened is a little vague as Miller sidetracks to home defense issues prior to 1899 and the unsuitability of the volunteer forces in their existing state for this purpose. 

A complex set of regulations appears to have dictated where and when irregulars could be used and with the events leading up to the war, these came to the fore. Miller provides a broad overview of why the War Office sanctioned the recruitment of the army irregulars and relative detail on the social composition of the different groups. He suggests that the War Office was not completely happy with the composition of the volunteers based on the areas they came from, but why this was perceived to be an issue is not fully explored. The main reasons why men volunteered centered on class and patriotism, although the revisionist economic explanation which arose during the 1960s also receives coverage. In setting out his arguments around recruitment, Miller has paid close attention to available statistics to prove his point and to highlight differences between regions and the three irregular forces. 

Chapters 4 through 6 focus on the experiences of the troops and make much use of memoirs and other personal accounts. Where little evidence exists, Miller puts it down to the commonness of the work and the proximity of the training bases to family and friends. Life on ship is accorded the same level of detail, with comments about the sighting of Los Palmas and Tenerife in particular. The time spent on board and in training was seen as important for building an esprit de corps which would be needed on the battlefield. The awareness of the officers in building this esprit, however, is juxtaposed by the accounts of what men were not trained or drilled in, such as putting up tents and hammocks. Special attention is also given to the time when the men realized what they had taken on: the moment of embarkation and the last sighting of UK territory. 

Unlike the majority of histories of the South African War, which tend to focus on the action, Miller is quite comfortable, albeit through the experiences of others, sharing the mundane and tedious side of the war. What becomes evident in chapter 5 is the infrequency with which the volunteers encountered the enemy and the drain this had on morale, especially when the men were not aware of the bigger picture. Other highlights include accounts of being under fire for the first time, the subordinate role of the volunteers on the battlefield when set pieces were fought and, again, the inadequacy of their preparation, such as not being able to saddle a horse. Special attention is given to the City of London Imperial Volunteers (CIV) throughout the book which perhaps is of no great surprise considering that much was written about them at the time, too. The jealousies this gave rise to are also addressed in this book. 

In dealing with the men's experiences of the war, Miller addresses the transition from traditional warfare to guerrilla war, but rather than from the tactical point of view, he explores the impact this had on the troops as their function changed to one of guarding prisoners and railway lines, killing animals, and burning farms. Again, there are diversions to explore the attitude towards and role of Black South Africans, of which over 30,000 fought on the side of the British, and the death of a French aristocrat, Comte de Villebois-Marueil, who was fighting on the side of the Boers. Dominating the correspondence is the British hatred of the Boers, negativity towards the war, and the growing restlessness amongst the troops towards those in command. 

Chapter 7 sees a return to more traditional historical narrative with less use of memoir and diaries. The chapter is one of contrasts as Miller compares the different responses in the press to the send-off of the troops and the reception accorded their officers compared to that of the men. The chapter also deals with the pressure on the officers to return men home before the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed and the difficulty they faced in launching offensives with depleted forces, an example being that of Lord Methuen's column of thirteen hundred which was compiled of men from fourteen different units. The subsequent assessment of the auxiliaries and the tension faced between meeting the need for bodies on the battlefield versus training culminates in the defeat and capture of Lord Methuen at Tweebosch, with most blame being placed on the Imperial Yeomanry. Miller balances the criticisms with evidence of support for the irregulars, particularly for the yeomanry and again, the CIV. Although some of the auxiliaries did not perform as expected, the overall verdict regarding their contribution to the British victory is positive. Where the men failed, this was not due to their inadequacies but rather to a lack of training and organization. 

The final chapter looks at the years following the end of the war and the restructuring of the armed forces through three secretaries of state for war, namely William Broderick, Hugh Arnold-Foster, and Richard Haldane. The changes introduced by Haldane were the most far-reaching, with the introduction of the Expeditionary Force and the change in focus from India to the continent as the last line of defense. Various reports were produced following enquiries of which the most prominent were the Elgin and Norfolk Commissions into the role of the auxiliaries and around the issue of conscription. Although the commissions pointed to weaknesses and concerns in the performance of the auxiliary troops, it was felt that these inadequacies were more to do with the organization of the troops and the paucity of preparation and thus the outcome was of the utmost praise for the men who rose to the call in Britain's time of need. Interspersed in the chapter is a discussion on the poor health of the volunteers noting that approximately a quarter were rejected for various reasons. Despite giving some space to Sir Frederick Maurice's views on the matter, Miller turns to the overriding theme of the day, namely, why men did not volunteer and the debate on whether conscription should be introduced. 

This book is a valuable contribution to a war about which much has been written. In its attempt to reconcile the strategic or political approach with the experiences of the irregular troops, use has been made of personal and government sources, giving it appeal to a wider range of readers than would necessarily have been the case if only one aspect had been addressed. At times, it was a little difficult to follow the author's argument as he introduces asides and alternative explanations; however, this does not distract from the purpose of the book, which was to tell the story of the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers in the South African War of 1899-1902 and highlight the changing attitude towards the military during the late Victorian era. If anything, it serves to further highlight the complex feelings and attitudes towards war and its relationship with society and politics.


----------



## archade (Feb 24, 2010)

Michael Howard. War in European History. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.  xii + 171 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-954619-0.

Reviewed by Brian G.H. Ditcham (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-German (February, 2010)


A Very Short (and Dated) Overview of European Warfare

This publication is somewhat curious. It is presented as an updated edition of a book first published in 1976, based on a series of lectures given by Michael Howard at the University of Warwick the year before. In fact, the core of the book (135 out of 144 pages of text) is, as far as one can judge, a barely amended reprint of the original book, supplemented by an epilogue that brings the story down to about 2004, and an updated set of notes for further reading. To a very considerable extent, therefore, one is looking at a book written in the mid-1970s--in the middle of major academic debates about the content and direction of military history as a subject (and, by pure coincidence, at the point when I was about to embark on my own postgraduate research). 

It is fair to say that only the most muted echoes of these debates find their way into Howard's account, though arguably a very short overview study that seeks to cover virtually a thousand years of European warfare in 135 small pages of generous print size is not the place to expect serious historiographical discussion. Howard is inevitably obliged to paint with a very broad brush indeed, and one cannot criticize him too much for doing so. Potential readers (and particularly those who may be tempted to use this book in a teaching context) do, however, need to be aware that Howard's account of warfare in the Middle Ages (his "Wars of the Knights") was very dated even in the 1970s, as it looks back essentially to the rather dismissive early-twentieth-century views of writers like Sir Charles Oman and Hans Delbrück. His approach to warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does, on the other hand, betray the influence of the then-recent writings of Michael Roberts and other advocates of the concept of a "military revolution" in the early seventeenth century.    

Overall, Howard's approach sits somewhere between the "traditional" military history focused on battles, tactics, and great commanders that was much decried by advocates of the "new military history" of the 1970s and the much more social history-based approaches that these scholars sought to advance, which were intended to be more attentive to the role of armies and the wars they fought as social and even cultural institutions. "Great Men" do play a prominent role in Howard's account, but they tend to be technicians like French artillery expert Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval or military administrators like Michel le Tellier rather than battlefield commanders. King Gustav Adolf Vasa of Sweden figures more as a military theoretician than a general, and it is revealing that the Prussian ruler who gets the most sustained attention in this account is Great Elector Frederick William rather than his great-grandson, Frederick the Great.  The only figure whose generalship is subjected to much analysis is Napoleon Bonaparte. While this is not quite "military history with the fighting left out" (a common criticism made against the new military history), no battle is analyzed in real depth. A whiff of technological determinism rises from Howard's account of the interplay between weapons, tactics, and military organization.

Above all, this work offers an account of warfare made very much from the top down. The experience of the ordinary fighting man hardly figures; his female companions (an indispensable element in every European army up to at least the Napoleonic era) are completely invisible. The common soldier is viewed in the mass, whether brutalized and marginalized (Howard's view of the standing armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) or the putatively patriotic conscript of the standing armies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The linkage between armies, states, and the societies that sustained them is sketched in sub-Marxian materialist terms, even if Howard devotes an unexpectedly lengthy passage to explaining how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels got it wrong by underestimating the appeal of patriotism to the masses. Irregular warfare is barely mentioned--even the Spanish guerillas of the Napoleonic Wars fail to make a mark.   

Inevitably in such a short book, choices on coverage have to be made. Howard's are (perhaps inadvertently) revealing. "Europe" in his presentation is basically the Europe of the European Community as it stood at the time he was writing, plus the Iberian peninsula and Switzerland (but only for the early modern period). Russia does not appear in the text until the Battle of Austerlitz (1806), and it is never entirely clear whether Howard regards Russia and later the Soviet Union as a European power or not. The Balkans are clearly non-European (even, implicitly, in the present day--the epilogue almost ignores the wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which admittedly fits at best awkwardly with Howard's overall thesis that warfare within Europe has become unthinkable since 1945). Following his account, the Baltic lands are barely more European--while Sweden gets a brief mention in the seventeenth century (its role in Roberts' "military revolution" could hardly permit its exclusion), the region vanishes after Gustav Adolf's death, and Karl XII of Sweden--one of traditional military history's greatest commanders--is never mentioned. The lands that made up the Warsaw Pact powers in 1975 are also excluded from Europe (except to the extent that the then-GDR could be seen as heir to the Kingdom of Prussia). Thus, for instance,  no mention is made in the medieval chapter of the Hussites and their devastatingly effective employment of artillery and field fortifications, which influenced warfare as far west as France. The Mediterranean is implicitly not a European sea--the rather patchy and poorly integrated sections on naval warfare focus entirely on "blue water," oceanic environments.  In practice the core of the book concerns France and Germany, with England/Great Britain as a kind of licensed oddity on the fringes and other places dipping in and out as the traditional narrative of military development requires. Italy, with its complex relationship between state-building, nationalism, and military developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, would have provided an interesting counterpoint to the German-centered view, but Giuseppe Garibaldi does not rate a mention (though Giuseppe Mazzini does). 

European imperial and colonial enterprises are almost literally pushed offshore for most of the book. The original text of 1975 included a section ("The War of the Merchants") that covered the naval aspects of European expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but had very little to say about what happened on shore in those faraway lands. Thereafter, colonial warfare is barely visible--until the final updating epilogue, which says more about the processes by which Britain, France, and the other European powers lost their empires than the original text did about how they came to acquire them in the first place. Given the importance of the colonial world to military careers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, this omission seems major. 

The original text bears the marks of its origins in a set of lectures that were no doubt stimulating but did not necessarily transfer well to written form. The result is a rather fragmented presentation that sees coverage of major conflicts like the Thirty Years War and even the First World War split up between different chapters. Other conflicts, including even the Second World War, get rather scanty and superficial coverage. The text is also riddled with errors, what were probably citations from memory, and sometimes odd judgments. Howard talks of a "War of Investiture" in medieval Italy (p. 18)--presumably he means the Investiture Contest, which was as much a war of words as of weapons, and happened a couple of centuries before the implied date. He places the operations of the "Great Company" in Italy between 1338 and 1354 (p. 25); this depiction seriously oversimplifies a complex set of developments over a rather different time scale. Talking of Edward I's Welsh Wars as "more like hunting game than war between Christians" may just possibly reflect the views of the average English knight of the times (p. 11), though I am unaware of any contemporary who put matters in quite those terms, but suggests rather disturbing implications. Admittedly, these examples come from the early sections of the book, where Howard is furthest from his areas of competence, but similar issues arise even in the rather unsatisfactory updating epilogue. Osama bin Laden is not "an ayatollah ... from Saudi Arabia" (p. 142) since "ayatollah" is a formal clerical grade known only in Shi'a Islam and bin Laden is Sunni. The total omission of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan seems curious to say the least. The whole epilogue has a rather rushed and provisional feel and some of its judgments already look dated. 

Michael Howard is undoubtedly one of Britain's most distinguished military historians, but this volumes by no means displays his best work. It is now mainly of historiographical interest in its demonstration of the ways in which the field of military history has changed in the past three decades.


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## archade (Feb 24, 2010)

C. Christine Fair, and Sumit Ganguly, eds. *Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces*. Oxford,  Oxford University Press, 2008.  xii + 227, ISBN 978-0-19-534203-1, ISBN 978-0-19-534204-8.

Reviewed by Sinderpal Singh (National University of Singapore)


The Case of the State vs. Insurgents: Encounters in Sacred Spaces

The subject of counterinsurgency has an enduring interest for academics, military strategists, and political elites alike, who have given significant attention to earlier British operations in Malaya and Kenya, the Indian state's attempts to deal with various insurgent challenges that still fester today, and U.S. attempts to "win the peace" in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As such, this highly relevant as well as timely book touches on a subject that continues to attract widespread interest, both from a historical point of view as well as from contemporary global politics. The volume seeks to contribute to the voluminous counterinsurgency literature in a very specific manner. It identifies two types of counterinsurgency operations that the literature has not dealt with satisfactorily--urban area insurgency and insurgents who take over sacred places. The authors' contention is that in most cases these sacred places are located in urban areas and this conjunction presents a distinct type of counterinsurgency challenge. 

The book is organized by chapters that look at specific cases in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The central point the book makes is that tactical and operational success may not always translate into strategic success in these types of counterinsurgency operations. Instead, the key is managing public perceptions and the resultant support the insurgents might derive from the local population and those further beyond who may identify with such insurgents. In short, the book makes the point that negotiating "sacrality" is key--tactical and operational methods/approaches need to be sensitive to this point. 

Chapter 1 outlines some key definitions in understanding sacred spaces. It also outlines why insurgents use sacred spaces and how this offers them asymmetrical advantage against counterinsurgents (who are usually the representatives of the "state"). It stresses the need for "religious intelligence" and the role of religious authorities in negotiating such types of operations. This chapter also discuss the case of Palestinian gunmen occupying the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in order to escape capture by the Israeli military. Chapters 2 to 7 then take on the task of discussing specific case studies within the analytical framework set out in the introduction and definitional parameters set out in chapter 1. 

Overall, this is a significant work. The authors are right to stress the importance of looking at counterinsurgency operations in sacred spaces as a specific type of operation, requiring a specific type of "intelligence." Another strength of this edited book is that the individual chapters (chapters 2 to 7 especially) work well as case studies, allowing the reader to quickly and clearly understand the important specifics of each case presented. It allows, in one volume, the reader the opportunity to receive a clearly presented range of different case studies, located across both time and space. The case studies also give a good sense, generally, of how and why certain sacred spaces come to be represented as "religious" and the importance of understanding such constructions of sacrality to this type of counterinsurgency effort. 

However, one problem that this work encounters is that, as much as negotiating "sacrality" is a specific type of counterinsurgency endeavor, it is difficult to advance any genuinely and radically "new" way to conduct counterinsurgency. In the end, several of the policy options offered are either strikingly obvious to the informed reader (like the need to ensure no damage is done to the structures of sacred buildings) or largely similar to the standard mantra offered for all types of counterinsurgency work--"winning hearts and minds," and collecting "good, credible intelligence." The point made about the need to understand the important differences in approaching primary and secondary religious places though is well taken and needs to be highlighted. 

Nevertheless, when it comes to general principles, the central mantra of all types of counterinsurgency is still the same--that the battle is over public perceptions. In this regard, this volume could have paid a bit more attention to not only the part of the public, both domestic and global, that may have sympathies with the insurgents but also the portion of the public which may strongly oppose such insurgents. The state needs to mediate the perceptions of the former, which this volume concentrates on, as well as the latter, on which this volume has little to say. The need for state elites not to appear "soft" or "weak" domestically, especially among those who oppose particular insurgents, in the face of challenges to state authority is central to understanding how counterinsurgency operations are approached and planned. There is thus more than one domestic constituency that the state has to cater to--and the perceptions of those opposing insurgents are as equally important to manage. 

As outlined earlier, the individual chapters that serve as case studies are one of the book's major strengths. However, the chapter on Iraq, chapter 6, leaves the reader less than convinced about the author's central hypothesis. The author argues that the central reason for the difference in approach by U.S. forces in the two separate Najaf episodes (April and August 2004 respectively) is due to the fact that the second operation by U.S. forces was afforded the legitimacy of a nominated Iraqi government, with power concentrated (as the author himself admits) in the hands of Prime Minister Allawi. This contrasts, according to the author, the lack of legitimacy for U.S. troops when Paul Bremer III held complete power as administrator of the Coalition Administration Authority (during the time of the first, April, "episode"). It is difficult, however, to understand how an unelected Iraqi government, widely seen as totally dependent on U.S. military power for its existence and survival, could credibly afford to give enough legitimacy to an operation on a Muslim (especially Shia) holy city led by U.S. forces. From this otherwise very clear account, it does seem instead that "operational learning" factors might have been more important in explaining the differences in approach to the April and August episodes by U.S. forces. 

Overall, as stated before, this is an important work and should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, contemporary military, and intelligence strategies as well as those just interested in the specific case studies covered in this volume.


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## archade (Feb 24, 2010)

Patrick Porter. Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes. New York, Columbia University Press, 2009. x + 263 pp, ISBN 978-0-231-15414-7.
Reviewed by Brian G.H. Ditcham (Independent Scholar)


At the Sharp End of Culture Wars?
It has to said at the outset that this is not an easy book for someone whose background lies in the field of historical studies to review adequately. Patrick Porter of the British Defence Academy at King’s College, University of London, is a man with a message. It is primarily directed at the political and military establishments of the United Kingdom and United States, though presumably those of any other country whose military forces might be engaged in conflicts with foes in faraway places could absorb it with profit. In order to convey his message, Porter has written a book which draws in turn on history, historiography, current affairs analysis, literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology. The time scale stretches from classical antiquity to the present day, the geographical coverage is global—and all of this in under two hundred pages of text. The result is at times slightly dizzying, especially as Porter also engages in sudden shifts of focus from the widest of angles to extreme close up.

Porter’s message, put simply, is that the employment of American and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has encouraged a view that culture dictates ways of making war and that, in order to fight wars in such alien environments successfully, commanders and troops on the ground need thorough training in the cultural ways of the societies from which their opponents derive. Porter, however, argues that this “culturalist” approach is based on deeply flawed understandings of how cultures work, especially in times of conflict, and tends to create monolithic categories of “western” and “eastern” warfare.

To substantiate his argument, Porter’s opening two chapters seek to set a broad historic context of “western” military engagement with “eastern” foes at a range of levels: practical, theoretical, and even popular cultural. Despite the obvious nod to the works of Edward Said in the title, these are not discussed in detail, and the “military orientalism” Porter seeks to identify is a rather more complex creation than what one might describe as a “vulgar Saidian” discourse of western superiority and eastern subjection would suggest. Inevitably Porter has to be very selective in his arguments. On his own admission, he focuses almost exclusively on writings in English, while conceding that looking at, say, French-language material would have added nuance to the analysis. One might suggest that Russian/Soviet views would have been even more interesting, given Russia’s ambiguous position as both a self-consciously “western” imperial power pushing eastwards into the steppes and, in the eyes of its European enemies, an “Asiatic” power unleashing barbarian hordes against the West. He skips very lightly over lengthy periods of time. The Roman Empire gets much less coverage than classical Greece (though curiously Alexander of Macedon is hardly mentioned despite his obvious relevance for debates on cultural approaches to warfare in eastern lands), while the Middle Ages and Renaissance get very short shrift, with only one fleeting reference to the Crusades. Ottoman Turkey is rarely mentioned, despite its status as the predominant “Oriental” power with which Europeans had dealings for some five hundred years.

For all that, Porter makes some important points. Under the stress of confrontation and combat, “western” and “eastern” militaries have clearly borrowed liberally from each other and in many cases have come to institutionalize such borrowings in the long term—even if the Swiss might debate Porter’s claim that it was Ottoman Janissaries who persuaded European armies to have military bands and march in step. Success in colonial warfare was often crucially dependent on the collaboration of elements of “native” society with the European colonizer. Casting the foe as irredeemably barbarous could provide a convenient justification for the use of what would otherwise be unacceptably brutal methods (though this matter does pose questions about the “legitimate” boundaries of mutual borrowing that Porter might have engaged with in more detail). On a more theoretical level, Porter’s point that western Orientalizers were as likely to idealize the eternal Orient of their imaginations as denigrate it is a well-taken one, as is his contention that, at least from the late nineteenth century onwards, propagandists for “Oriental” causes like Japanese imperialism or Arab nationalism were very ready to promote organic and essentialist visions of their own cultures as ways of asserting their own innate superiority over a vulgar materialist West. Such assertions might in turn be employed by western cultural commentators at odds with the development of their own societies as a mirror for the alleged shortcomings of the latter. He has little difficulty showing that contemporary commentators who contrast a “western” way of war based on the writings of Carl von Clausewitz and an “eastern” one based on Sun Tzu (usually as a way of denigrating the former) are caricaturing both what Clausewitz actually said and the ways in which the supposedly “Clausewitzian” militaries of the “West” have in practice gone about fighting their wars. Intriguingly, he does not subject the Sun Tzu side of the equation to quite the same level of deconstruction, while observing that the actual practice of Asian militaries has also been strikingly at odds with Sun Tzu’s supposed lessons. While perhaps less original than he implies, his demonstration that groups like Al-Qaeda are products of a globalized, Internet-linked environment and are quite willing to engage in organizational, tactical, and even ideological borrowing from sources as diverse as published U.S. army manuals, Latin American urban guerilla theorists, and even American white supremacist writers is convincing. His mutual adaptation model perhaps begins to falter around this point, however; despite his best efforts to “normalize” suicide bombing as a technique of war, one suspects that this practice is extremely unlikely to be incorporated as a tactical option in manuals used at U.S. or British staff colleges in the foreseeable future.

One might however wonder just how “Orientalist” a lot of this discussion is. Porter’s historical “Orientals” include Zulus, Aztecs, Sioux, and even (briefly and by implication) the thoroughly European-model Mexican army that besieged the Alamo. As far as the contemporary world is concerned, Rwandan Hutus and the peoples of former Yugoslavia (especially the Serbs) join this group. The analysis thus poses a considerable danger of making the whole concept so generalized as to become meaningless. A thorough overview of the ways in which (say) European societies have viewed non-European foes encountered on the battlefield and how these views have shifted over time in the last three thousand years might well be a fascinating (if unwieldy) project. A genuinely comparative dimension would presumably include a look at how other literate societies saw their foes—and might well find more convergences than divergences. Early Arab chroniclers analyzed their forefathers’ Byzantine and Persian foes in terms of luxury and servitude, depicted the still-pagan Turks they encountered in Central Asia as violent barbarians, alternately cunning and stupid, and reacted with horrified incomprehension to the scorched-earth tactics employed by the Berber confederation whose revolt temporarily reversed the advance of the early Caliphates’ armies in North Africa—all recognizable “Orientalist” stereotypes.

Indeed, many similar points might be made with respect to hostilities between European societies. As Porter himself notes, an ongoing academic debate persists about the existence of a specifically “German” culture of war marked, amongst other things, by extreme violence against civilians, whether Herero or Belgian. It would not be difficult to map most of the cultural issues identified by Porter onto the ways in which German society and the armies it has produced have been analyzed by others, from the Roman writer Gaius Cornelius Tacitus’s use of what many modern writers would see as a largely imaginary picture of German society to criticize its contemporary Roman counterpart through a belief that Germans are “innately” warlike, to the idealization of Wehrmacht prowess by certain Cold War military theorists. If everybody is somebody else’s “Oriental,” are we perhaps looking at much deeper forces linked to issues of maintaining social cohesion, particularly in periods of crisis, and legitimizing conflict and conquest, whether the societies in question are “western” or “Oriental”? Much of Porter’s evidence would seem to tend in that direction, though it is not one in which he chooses to go very far.
The next four chapters narrow the field down dramatically, while going off in slightly unexpected directions. The first of these examines the reactions of a group of British army officers to Japan’s triumph in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. These were almost uncritically pro-Japanese, despite the implications which the victory of “yellow” Japan over “white” Russia is generally seen as having had for European imperial powers. (It would be interesting to know if there were any dissidents within the British military.) Despite visible racial prejudices, the officers in question were also generally astute observers of Japanese society; far from attributing Japan’s success to the successful adaptation of a timeless Japanese samurai culture to modern warfare, they were quick to note that the Japanese military they observed was the product of recent social developments, especially in education. As Porter notes, however, it is clear that the main purpose of their idealization of a Japan in which the education system was designed to produce fervently patriotic conscripts and where military decision-making was largely insulated from the influence of elected politicians was to provide a model that Britain should follow. In their view, an urbanized society ruled by liberal politicians in which patriotism appeared to be in terminal decline was an inferior social and political structure doomed to decline. Arguably, as the First World War was to show, the culture they failed to understand was their own.

The following chapter looks at the various ways in which the British military theorist Basil Liddell Hart sought to make use of the thirteenth-century Mongol armies as justifications and precedents for his own theories of how war should be waged. Porter has no difficulty showing just how slippery Liddell Hart could be in his use of history, rewriting his descriptions of how the Mongol forces operated to suit his shifting views of how the mobile warfare he championed should be organized (in particular to cover up his own misconceptions as these had been revealed by Second World War realities). Porter also notes Liddell Hart’s evasiveness about the sheer violence of Mongol warfare as it impacted the societies the Mongols attacked (and, by extension, the consequences of his own preferred ways of making war for civilian populations) and his writing of aspects such as siege warfare out of history altogether. While the picture of Liddell Hart which emerges is far from flattering, it is, however, fair to say that he can hardly be the only theorist, military or otherwise, to have been guilty of selectivity when invoking historical precedents for their preferred options.

Returning to the present day, Porter then examines “culturalist” approaches to the Afghan Taliban and how, in his view, these have failed to account adequately for realities on the ground by overstressing the supposedly irrational or tribalist nature of the movement. This argument involves going over some of the ground already traversed in earlier chapters, with much stress placed on the malleability of supposedly immutable tribal or religious cultures when confronted with serious external challenges (the adoption of suicide bombing, previously despised as cowardly), the tactical flexibility that even the most fundamentalist movements may display to rally support in time of war (shifting attitudes to opium cultivation or female education)—and the gap between the self-image such movements may choose to project to outsiders and the reality of their practice (glorification of “martyrdom” as against much more complex guerilla tactics). Again many of Porter’s points are well taken, though some of his analysis is inevitably based on sources that are not above suspicion—Porter’s own strictures on the alleged gullibility of western media in the face of manipulation by Taliban sources might equally apply to, say, the testimonies of Taliban defectors. Inevitably, this section of the book (written, it would seem from the endnote references, in the first half of 2008) already looks a little dated in the light of developments in the past eighteen months; while the role of Pakistan as a “safe haven” for the Afghan Taliban is noted, it is reasonable to assume that Pakistan and its internal conflicts would bulk a good deal larger if Porter was writing this section now, and one imagines also that issues surrounding the 2009 Afghan presidential election would have proved a fertile source for “culturalist” commentary of the kind he deplores.

The final chapter is an analysis of the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hizballa (Porter’s preferred spelling) in south Lebanon. By comparison with the other chapters, this one feels somewhat rushed and superficial. The Israeli High Command clearly underestimated the technical and military skills of its foes (as well as their ability to present a coherent media presentation of their side of the fight) and Israeli solders on the ground discovered that years of occupation duty in Palestinian territories had proved poor training for serious combat against a well-armed enemy prepared to stand his ground. No doubt a sense of cultural superiority undermined the Israeli effort as well, though Porter’s own implication that Iranian training and support meant that Hizballa forces were in some sense no longer “Arab” sits oddly with the main thrust of his book.

Ultimately a book of this type is presumably intended to exercise some influence over political and military decision-making. Given Porter’s own stress on the willingness of groups like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban to absorb external influences, one suspects he would not be surprised if copies turn up in remote parts of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. I therefore turned to the conclusions with anticipation. Was Porter going to say that the cultural turn in military affairs he detects was bunk and announce a new paradigm—”Armies do fighting, not culture,” for instance? Some points he made along the way seemed to point in that direction. While conceding in the introduction that the cultural turn had paid some dividends, a sense of damnation with faint praise hung in the air—especially when coupled with a recognition that cultural sensitivity training for soldiers is an expensive business in terms of time and money (with the additional complication—not mentioned by Porter—that years of training could be rendered useless overnight by a change in deployment). Cases where experts got things badly wrong appear throughout the book. In the end, though, Porter contents himself with a call not to abandon the cultural turn but to do it better. The problem, perhaps, is that “doing it better” is likely to mean stirring in even more variables and looking out for the kinds of selective use and modification of cultural characteristics that are only likely to emerge clearly with hindsight. At least some of Porter’s own arguments could be read, no doubt against his own intentions, as proving that basic military pragmatism will ultimately push cultures in predictable directions.

This is perhaps a rather downbeat note on which to end the review of a very rich and stimulating work that raises far more issues than can be addressed even in this excessively lengthy review. From a narrowly British perspective, Porter’s repeated snipes at contemporary British military thinking and performance raise interesting questions about how years of engagement in Northern Ireland (a conflict not mentioned by Porter) may have impacted the British Army’s ability to operate in combat situations. On a wider front, it is a pity that he did not engage more fully with what he describes as “democratic defeatism”—the belief that democratic states are by their very pluralist nature less able to fight “difficult” wars successfully—or take some rather different case studies (since the Balkans are part of Porter’s “Orient,” some comparative work on the Balkan wars of the 1910s and 90s might have repaid the effort). In the end, however, one cannot help feeling that any decision-maker, political or military, who reads this book will end up persuaded that culture is very important in military matters but little the wiser on how best to take that fact into account in practical policymaking.


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## archade (Feb 28, 2010)

From the US Army Combined Arms Research Library: http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm

Introducing the Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle

Looking for historical wargaming resources? The Combined Arms Research Library is pleased to announce the Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle which contains a compilation of orders of battle from 1600 to 1945. Sources range from published works to primary archival documents. Most orders of battle break down to the regimental leveland many contain information regarding the availability of strength figuresand artillery equipment. The collection is available for searching at http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/nafziger.htm

Available also is a pdf index ofthe over 7900 orders of battle to assist in searching. Search for Nafziger in Google and you will see an explosion of interest inthis brand new, freely available resource, which was made possible by the generosity of George Nafziger.


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## archade (May 12, 2010)

Sarah-Jane Corke. *U.S. Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945-53*. Studies in Intelligence Series. London: Routledge, 2008. ix + 240 pp, ISBN 978-0-415-42077-8.

Reviewed by Mark Montesclaros
Published on H-War (April, 2010)

Lessons Not Learned

Sarah-Jane Corke provides new insight on policy and intelligence planning during the Truman administration, specifically in the area of covert operations and psychological warfare during the period 1945-53. Benefiting from the flood of documents recently declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the author examines in detail the inner workings of the Cold War-era Washington interagency, as it tried to come to grips with new threats and the means to combat them. In doing so, Corke makes some strong assertions that merit serious attention. Corke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Corke’s primary contention is that under President Harry Truman, the United States had no overarching, coherent strategy for conducting its Cold War foreign policy. This, in turn, had a direct and largely negative impact on the planning and execution of covert operations, which, in turn, had an abysmal record of success, particularly in Eastern Europe. “Covert operations,” the subject of the author’s work, is an umbrella term used to describe U.S.-sponsored activities against adversaries or in support of friends for which U.S. government involvement is not evident to the general public, or which can be plausibly disclaimed. Corke also uses the terms “political warfare” and “psychological warfare” extensively, the former a more encompassing term while the latter may refer to more specific operations including propaganda, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and contact with underground groups in adversary territory. The author is careful to point out the nuances and contexts behind use of these terms, and explains their evolution effectively, as they came to be associated, at times, with a particular agency within the Washington national security bureaucracy.

The author argues her thesis by interweaving several themes, each of which is devoted a chapter in her work. Foremost is that Cold War policy under Truman was at best ambiguously stated and responsive primarily to internal vice external factors. Corke interestingly (and counterintuitively) maintains that Soviet policy was much more a result of U.S. domestic politics and bureaucratic infighting than it was based on Soviet action and American counteraction. In the vacuum of ambiguous policy, the various institutions charged with national security policy jockeyed for power and influence in the realm of covert operations and psychological warfare, and in doing so often operated at cross purposes, resulting in flawed policy and failed operations in the field.

Corke also contends that the key organizations involved in national security decision making--the National Security Council (NSC), State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA--largely ran amok and rudderless, all influenced by the relative inability of the Truman administration to corral them. The CIA, for example, was singularly influenced by the legacy of Wild Bill Donovan, its founder and soul. Donovan’s penchant for derring-do and initiative above all else produced a climate that rewarded action vice inaction, regardless of results on the ground.

Of course, Donovan was but one strong character in a narrative replete with larger-than-life personalities--including George Kennan, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, Paul Nitze, James Forrestal, etc. It is no wonder that a single entity or personality was unable to harness the collective energy of the interagency, to include President Truman, and provide a single, unifying vision for U.S.-Soviet policy. In military parlance, what was lacking was unity of command and, perhaps more important, unity of purpose in interagency efforts at the time.

Interestingly, frequent and recurring administration attempts to give structure to covert operations and psychological warfare only resulted in further confusion and mismanagement. Corke maintains that such organizations as the Psychological Strategy Board, specifically designed to remove gaps between national policy and operations on the ground, only served to cause further interagency squabbles and confusion. In the end, nearly all of the interagency structures designed to improve the efficacy of covert operations were doomed to inefficiency based on the continuing failure to reconcile visions and agendas of the participating agencies and their heads. Thus, the fundamental strategic problem--getting the “ends” right, was never reconciled, leaving the “means”--caused psychological warfare and covert operations to flounder.

The magnitude of the tragedy in failed covert operations during the period will most likely never be known. The author uses as one case in point the curiously named Operation Valuable (later Project BGFIEND), a covert operation designed to destabilize the government of Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha between 1949 and 1954. Scores of commandos, consisting of Albanian refugees and Albanians of American descent, were inserted into the country to drum up popular support and initiate a potential overthrow of the Hoxha regime. Despite numerous failures and setbacks, CIA operations continued and were even expanded several times. Corke notes that between two hundred and one thousand people died during these unsuccessful operations, which accentuated “the complete breakdown between policy and operations that existed during these years” (p. 99).

Perhaps what readers will find most interesting about the book is the nuanced view of Cold War policy and strategy, along with their attendant national security documents. Those familiar primarily with the policy of containment and NSC-68 may be surprised to learn about the various policy gradations proposed, to include “liberation,” “rollback,” and “Titoism.” These competing strategic visions had their various political and interagency proponents throughout the period and addressed the seminal question of how to deal with Soviet aggression. Likewise, readers may be fascinated by Corke’s meticulous dissection of interagency bureaucratic politics and the policies they produced. The author does a thorough job of explaining how and why the interagency acted the way it did, and how competing personalities and visions resulted in ambiguous policy and multiple interpretations of what the United States was trying to accomplish. As a result, covert operations and psychological warfare continued to thrive, often without government oversight or checks and balances.    

Corke’s work has obvious relevance in the modern context, as multiple government agencies struggle to define national security policy and outcomes in the post-9/11 world. It underscores that there is a difference between lessons and lessons learned; that is, national security policymakers must consciously decide whether to incorporate what is learned from the past or choose to ignore such knowledge. There has to be a formal mechanism for this to happen; otherwise, bureaucracies will continue to churn out flawed policies. Next, the author clearly demonstrates the impact of domestic considerations on the foreign policymaking process. As a teacher of the national security strategy making process, it is all too often the case that one focuses on external causes and events vice internal happenings to explain how and why policy is made. Corke clearly shows that Cold War-era policymaking was largely done in the context of domestic politics and bureaucratic infighting rather than as a response to Soviet actions.

Additionally, the author’s painstaking analysis of the interagency process during 1945-53 clearly demonstrates the difficulty in formulating national security policy in a democracy. The author presents a detailed and much more nuanced view of U.S. Cold War policy, one that goes far beyond well-known directives, such as the seminal NSC-68, and such personalities as Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Nitze. Her explanation of the labyrinthine national security decision-making architecture under Truman is of great value to those studying the interagency process and anyone interested in how national security policy is formulated. Corke’s work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Cold War policymaking, adding insightful depth as well as breadth.


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## archade (May 12, 2010)

A. R. Azzam. Saladin. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009. ix + 277 pp, ISBN 978-1-4058-0736-4.

Reviewed by Timothy May (North Georgia College & State University)
Published on H-War (January, 2010)


The Complete Saladin

Although Saladin, or more properly Salah al-Din, is one of the best-known figures from the era of the Crusades and indeed all of medieval Islamic history, surprisingly few scholarly biographies have been published on him. In 1972, Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz published his Saladin. Nineteen eighty-two saw the appearance of Malcolm Lyon and David Jackson’s Saladin: The Politics of Holy War, which was followed in 1983 by Philip Newby’s Saladin in His Time. Then in 2008, the English reading world received David S. Bachrach’s translation of Hannes Mohring’s Saladin: The Sultan and His Times, 1138-1193. Of course there have been numerous biographies targeted to the popular audience but of varied quality. A. R. Azzam’s Saladin is a panacea for all audiences.

While it is impossible to avoid the Crusades while discussing Saladin, Azzam does an excellent job of demonstrating that Saladin did many other things besides capture Jerusalem and fight Richard the Lionhearted. Indeed, Azzam’s prologue focuses on peeling away the myths surrounding Saladin so that the reader may gain a better understanding of the figure who is at some point cast as a symbol of jihad or the paragon of chivalry. He notes that in his discussions with various people who learned that he was writing about Saladin, most did not appreciate it when he pointed out that particular events were actually fables--something that I think most historians have encountered at one point or another. This section also contains a discussion of the authors of the most important sources on Saladin: al-Qadi al-Fadil, Imad al-din al-Isfahani, and Baha al-din Ibn Shaddad. 

The first chapter has less to do with Saladin and more with the context of the Islamic world during the rise of Saladin. In this reviewer’s opinion, it is possibly the most significant chapter of the book and what sets it apart from other works on Saladin. Azzam convincingly demonstrates the importance of the great wazir of the Seljuk Empire, Nizam al-Mulk, and his influence on Saladin through the creation of the Nizamiyya madrasa network. Nizam al-Mulk’s primary goal through these schools was to revive Sunni orthopraxy and counter the growing influence of Shia Islam, particularly that of the Ismailis. 

Chapters 2 and 3 continue this vein of thought by discussing the rise of Nur al-Din, the devout son of Zengi, atabeg of Mosul who had been the Seljuk’s primary military leader in their western domains. Here, Azzam continues to provide intellectual and geopolitical context for the life of Saladin. After a brief discussion of the arrival of the Crusaders, he then delves into the rise of Zengi and of Ayyub and Shirkuh (Saladin’s father and uncle respectively) in Zengid service. From there, Azzam discuss how Nur al-Din was pivotal to the spread of the Nizamiyya madrasas not only by being a patron but also by living the ideals espoused by the madrasa. Azzam argues that no matter what he did, Saladin had to live his life in the shadow of Nur al-Din.

In chapters 4 through 6, Azzam examines Saladin in Egypt--from the initial involvement of Nur al-Din in that country to counter the Crusader attempts to dominate the Fatimid Empire to Saladin’s eventual emergence as the ruler of Egypt. Of particular note is Azzam’s consideration of Saladin’s appointment as vizier of the Fatimid dynasty and then in chapter 6, of how Saladin established his authority over Egypt.

Azzam then considers Saladin’s relations with the successors of Nur al-Din as well as the religious elite in chapters 7 and 8. What is often overlooked in most studies of Saladin, with their emphasis on his fight against the Crusaders, is that many Muslim rulers did not trust Saladin. Azzam does a magnificent job of illustrating the difficulties of Saladin in maintaining his empire through a mix of conquest and cajoling while also maintaining his legitimacy in the eyes of the religious elite.

The second half of the book (chapters 9 through 15), like the second half of Saladin’s life, is connected to the Crusades. Azzam carefully considers the Arabic and Latin sources on Saladin’s encounters with various Crusader leaders and his dealings with his own relations and allies. It is this well-rounded approach that demonstrates the complexity of Saladin’s relations with his vassals and family. Indeed, it is also what makes this book so suitable for classroom use.

In the final analysis, Azzam has written a book that portrays Saladin as neither hero nor villain but rather a human being with faults and merits. It is an ideal biography as the reader not only learns about an individual but also gains a greater appreciation of the geopolitical milieu (a topic often covered in this genre) and the intellectual environment that shaped Saladin’s world view.


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## archade (May 12, 2010)

Stephen G. Fritz.* Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II*. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. x + 299 pp., ISBN 978-0-8131-1920-5.

Reviewed by Jay B. Lockenour (Franklin and Marshall College)
Published on H-War (December, 1995)

In Frontsoldaten, Stephen Fritz of East Tennessee State University has chosen to tackle the tendentious and complicated issue of the "everyday life" of German Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In so doing, Fritz has not only given us a powerful account of the misery and anxiety experienced by the common Landser, especially on the Eastern Front, but he has also made a significant contribution to our understanding of the ideological roots of the German soldiers' resiliency in defense of the National Socialist state. Following in the footsteps of Manfred Messerschmidt and Omer Bartov, Fritz concludes that the staying power of the Landser depended in large part on his conviction that the National Socialist state had "redeemed the failures of World War I and had restored, both individually and collectively, a uniquely German sense of identity" (p. 10).

Explaining that loyalty is not Fritz's only goal. Fritz's subject is also "the nature of men at war," and he does an admirable job of conveying the individual experience of war and the soldiers' sense of abandonment to a wretched fate. Successive chapters entitled "Living on Borrowed Time," "Withstanding the Strain," "Seasons of War," and "The Many Faces of War" outline the physical and emotional discomforts of war, perhaps shared by most soldiers in most wars.

"Living on Borrowed Time" portrays the battlefield as an excruciatingly lonely place in which chaos and fear reign supreme and only death or a serious wound provide an escape. Soldiers combatted their fears with the aid of medals, alcohol, music, jokes, religion, and sex, as outlined in Chapter 4, "Withstanding the Strain." Despite those palliatives, however, the soldier's life is depicted as one of almost inescapable misery, particularly on the Eastern Front, which soldiers described as "less a place than a series of natural disasters" (p. 119). In "Seasons of War," Fritz does a masterful job of placing the reader in the hip-deep mud of the Russian spring and fall, the scorching heat of the Russian summer, and the biting winds and disorienting whiteness of the dreaded Russian winter.

And yet Fritz is not "softhearted" in his treatment of the German Landser. The reader is never allowed to forget these men's dual role as suffering victims and cruel perpetrators. The chapter "The Many Faces of War" is devoted in part to expressions of a pronounced "delight in destruction" on the part of the common soldiers. Guy Sajer, one of Fritz's frequently recurring witnesses to the horrors of the Eastern Front, recalls his "almost drunken exhilaration" when in the midst of a battle (p. 149). The letters and diaries of many former soldiers are characterized not just by a nonchalance about death, but by a frankly expressed thrill in killing and in the sense of complete freedom from restraint (p.146).

The value of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) does not lie in its simple recounting of the experiences of the individual, however. Fritz himself reminds the reader, citing Detlev Peukert, that "everyday history has no object of its own but seeks to legitimize the independent experiences of its subjects, to mediate [emphasis added] between individual life experiences and impersonal historical analysis, and to provide a perspective on various life-styles and differing areas of social reality" (p. 7). It is the ability of Frontsoldaten to combine the individual experience with a sense of the "impersonal historical analysis" that makes it so interesting.

By focusing not only on the everyday experience of the soldiers but also their motivations and strategies for coping with suffering, Fritz is able to clarify the importance of National Socialist ideology in sustaining the morale of the Wehrmacht. One striking oversight in the book, however, is Fritz's seeming unwillingness directly to engage the work of other historians on the subject, especially the recent work of Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (1991). Frontsoldaten is filled with implicit links to the more "impersonal" works of history that Hitler's Army typifies. In many ways, Fritz's book is much better than Bartov's, more gripping, colorful, and intense. I sympathize completely with Fritz's concern to make his work more than simply a review of Bartov's, but by responding more directly to Bartov's theses about the "demodernization of the front," the "destruction of the primary group," and the "perversion of discipline," Fritz could have provided precisely that "mediation" between "individual experiences and impersonal historical analysis" that is the (too often latent) strength of Alltagsgeschichte as a method.

In Hitler's Army, Bartov proposes that the extreme conditions at the front and the enormous casualties of the campaigns in the Soviet Union combined to prepare the Wehrmacht to be molded according to the demands of Hitler's racist and nationalist ideology. Since "primary group" loyalty and endless morale-boosting victories could no longer compensate German soldiers for their suffering after 1941, Wehrmacht officials substituted draconian punishments and liberal doses of National Socialist racist ideology in order to maintain the cohesion of their units. According to Bartov, discipline was "perverted" within the German military, so that atrocities against civilians and enemy soldiers went unpunished, whereas the slightest infractions against military regulations were liable to evoke truly homicidal responses from the military police. As a result, Bartov concludes, the common Landsers, unable to mitigate their suffering in any other way, lashed out in anger and frustration against the only targets within range, enemy soldiers and civilians, transforming the war, especially on the Eastern Front, into a horrific bloodbath.

Much of the evidence that Fritz provides supports Bartov's thesis regarding the reactions of the common soldier. Though he does not share Bartov's concern with proving intent on the part of the Wehrmacht leadership, Fritz does depict a front rapidly "demodernized" by a combination of weather and mechanized battle. Fritz too emphasizes the importance of comradeship in maintaining the cohesion of the German army, and the difficulties that soldiers faced when the tremendous casualties of the Russian campaigns so rapidly destroyed the "primary groups." Fritz also describes soldiers who delight in killing and who explicitly acknowledge the compensatory nature of such destruction in ways that none of Bartov's sources do.

Yet Fritz leaves these obvious connections undeveloped through at least the first two hundred pages of the book, using Bartov's work more often as a "primary" source (quoting passages from letters and diaries directly from Bartov's book) than as a useful foil for his own conclusions. In the concluding chapters of the book, Fritz does begin to engage Bartov especially, but not systematically or thoroughly enough for my taste. Fritz's work adds many nuances to Bartov's and corrects so many of Bartov's mistakes that a more complete analysis of the connections between Frontsoldaten and Hitler's Army would have been worthwhile.

Fritz goes beyond Bartov's account by providing better evidence, not only of the "negative" integrative effects of punishment, but also of the important "positive" effects of the National Socialist ideal of a Volksgemeinschaft in maintaining cohesion within the Wehrmacht. In Chapter 8, "Trying to Change the World," Fritz uncovers very strong evidence of the "responsive chord" that Nazi ideas struck within the army (p. 188). As even contemporary German soldiers acknowledged, negative ideas such as racism and draconian punishment were simply insufficient to explain the extraordinary resiliency of the German soldier. He required a "positive" ideal as well, something to fight for.

And that ideal was the supposedly classless, conflict-free society that was being created at the front and that would later follow the soldiers home to Germany itself. Certainly the "negative," racist and disciplinary elements were important. Russia in particular, Fritz argues, was the place "where many Landsers, previously sceptical of Nazi propaganda, confronted what they accepted as the reality of the Jewish-Bolshevik destruction of a whole nation" (p. 198). But in the "trenches" and on the battlefields of Russia, the Landser also believed that he was witnessing the positive transformation of German society into a classless one where burdens were shared by all.

There is certainly more to recommend this book, but there are also other problems with it. For example, Fritz uses letters, diaries, and memoirs more or less interchangeably to provide the reader with insights into the state of mind and motivations of the German soldier. Yet, although Fritz does occasionally refer to the implications of military censorship for his work, he leaves untouched the issue of the audiences for whom these letters and diaries and memoirs were written. Letters sent home from the front to loved ones must have been motivated by different emotions, different concerns, than a personal diary or (especially) a memoir written for public consumption. If Fritz did in fact notice a similarity among all three sources, this would have been remarkable, and it would have strengthened his argument to bring that fact more fully to the reader's attention.

Fritz even occasionally uses novels, such as Willi Heinrich's Cross of Iron (1988) and Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt (1982), with scarcely a mention of the methodological problems novels present as historical sources. Malaparte, without doubt an insightful observer of the Russian front, was not German, and his novel is full of literary devices and allegory, making Kaputt a very problematic source indeed. An over-reliance on a few published sources, notably the memoirs and letters of Guy Sajer, Karl Fuchs, and Hans W. Woltersdorf, also undermines Fritz's efforts to generalize his conclusions.

Stephen Fritz's Frontsoldaten is nevertheless a shining example of the possibilities of writing the "history of everyday life." Such history, as Fritz acknowledges, is too often "impressionistic and nonanalytical," and yet "it still touches our ability to comprehend social and historical reality.... It also says something about whether the theoretical abstractions with which historians of necessity operate are capable of grasping human phenomena made up of countless individual perceptions and actions" (p. 5).

Although he occasionally seems to hesitate in driving his "abstract" point home by actively engaging the "theoretical" work of other historians (especially Bartov), Fritz has indeed helped to explain how National Socialist ideology combined with the personal experience of war to create the conditions in which German soldiers perservered in defense of a criminal state. By establishing the link between the personal experience of war and the theoretical abstractions of historians, Fritz has fulfilled, at least in part, the promise of Alltagsgeschichte. And he has done so while telling the powerful personal story of soldiers who were both victims and perpetrators of a horrible war.


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## archade (May 12, 2010)

John Francis Guilmartin, Inc. NetLibrary. *A very short war: the Mayaguez and the Battle of Koh Tang*. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. xxi + 238 pp. ISBN 978-0-585-17507-2.

Reviewed by Adam B. Siegel (Center for Naval Analyses, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Published on H-War (June, 1996)

In A Very Short War, John Guilmartin provides a rich examination of the last episode of the U.S. war in Indochina--the multi-service operation to recover the merchant ship Mayaguez and her crew from the Khmer Rouge less than a month after the final U.S. evacuations from Phnom Penh and Saigon. Through a detailed operational-tactical study of this discrete political-military event, Guilmartin seeks to illuminate how the modern "communications revolution will create as many problems as it solves" (p. 29), rather than being an undiluted good as many may think.

In April and May 1975, the U.S. military conducted a series of three discrete military operations that put an end to the (U.S.) Vietnam War: Frequent Wind (the evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 12 April); Eagle Pull (the evacuation of Vietnamese and Americans from Saigon, South Vietnam, 29-30 April); and the Mayaguez recapture (12-15 May). Guilmartin opens the book with a discussion of Frequent Wind and Eagle Pull; then, after setting the scene, he turns to the events of the Mayaguez capture and the U.S. response to the Khmer actions. President Gerald Ford "quickly settled on three overlapping objectives: recover the ship and the crew; avoid...hostage negotiations; and mount a demonstrative use of US force to bolster America's international credibility" (p. 38). The interaction of these three objectives created a time imperative and determined the forces to be used: U.S. Air Force helicopters from Thailand to carry Marines airlifted from Okinawa to recapture the ship and rescue the crew; air support from Air Force aircraft operating from Thailand and Navy aircraft from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea conducting retaliatory strikes against the Cambodian mainland. In the intense operations over the next three days, U.S. forces killed perhaps a hundred Cambodians and bombed a variety of Khmer facilities. This came at a high price, with fifteen Americans killed in action, three more missing in action, and fifty wounded; four helicopters shot down; and another helicopter crashed with twenty-three killed (p. 28).

The Mayaguez operation raises many points to consider in regard to the "communications revolution" in a period when at least some in the U.S. military believe that the "information revolution" might allow total knowledge at higher command. President Ford and others in Washington certainly had reason to believe they had (nearly) perfect information for decision-making. As one of the earliest actions during the crisis, a U-2 strategic reconnaissance plane was put in the air to act as a communications relay between forces on the scene and higher headquarters. Despite (or because of) these efforts to have improved communications, White House attempts to control the tactical situation caused near disaster on at least two occasions during the operation.

-- At one point, the White House had issued orders to sink anything coming off Koh Tang Island. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stalled for time, unsure of the propriety of this sort of tactical control. His delay perhaps prevented an attack on a Cambodian fishing boat carrying the Mayaguez crew from the island to the mainland (pp. 55-56).

-- As soon as the White House learned that the Mayaguez crew had been released, orders went out to cease all offensive operations and "to disengage and withdraw all forces...as soon as possible." This order almost prevented a reinforcement of the forces on the island that was crucial to ensure the withdrawal from Koh Tang (p. 107).

As these examples suggest, the realities of this Very Short War should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone expecting that the increased communications capabilities are an unadulterated good.

Within this book are many other fascinating insights into the U.S. military in the waning days of Vietnam involvement (and, perhaps, militaries in general). For example, Guilmartin discusses the changes occurring in the training and tactics of the helicopter squadrons as they moved from a wartime environment. Not surprisingly--but perhaps dismaying--even by 1975 USAF helicopter training was constrained by peacetime restrictions. Guilmartin's emphasis on the differences between specific units suggests the point that these differences might be opaque to higher headquarters and the civilian leadership not familiar with "tactical" details that are crucial for making tactical decisions.

Guilmartin, then a U.S. Air Force officer, was a "participant-observer" in this operation, handling maintenance for one of the two USAF helicopter squadrons. Although this book is published twenty years after the event, Guilmartin brings an immediacy to the work that only someone so close to it could. Guilmartin was not, however, simply a participant in the events discussed in this book. In 1975, he had just returned to the operating forces after three years at Princeton University completing his Ph.D. dissertation [1], followed by four years teaching at the Air Force Academy. Thus, Guilmartin was a trained historian and data gatherer, as well as a decorated rescue pilot with 119 combat missions in Southeast Asia. With his academic background, Guilmartin began gathering information as the operation proceeded and began interviewing with the idea of helping preserve (and, in part, create) a historical record of the operation that provides a key basis for this book.

This aspect of the work is one that fascinates. As Guilmartin phrased his approach, "Even before the smoke cleared, I was automatically trying to find out what had gone wrong and why" (p. xvi). This near-participation in the actual events allows him to provide a much richer context than archival material or (with more modern events) interviews alone can offer.

In a way, Guilmartin's strengths create the basis for some of the shortcomings of A Very Short War. After finishing the book, readers will feel confident that they have a deep understanding of the U.S. Air Force's helicopter forces involved in the Mayaguez affair, and a long appendix on the principal helicopter involved (the H-53) provides important technical background. When Guilmartin moves on to other USAF elements and other services, however, the depth of description and, therefore, understanding decrease. For example, Guilmartin describes the differences between the two involved helicopter squadrons--one a special operations and the other a rescue squadron--and how their H-53 helicopters were equipped, how their tactics differed, how peacetime training rules since the end of the war in Vietnam had affected their readiness, and their differing philosophies to life and combat.

In contrast to the treatment of the USAF helicopter forces, A Very Short War contains almost no similar details about the Marines who were, after all, the principal combat troops on the ground and who suffered the majority of the casualties. We learn little of their weapons, of their training background, or of how the Vietnam experience affected their approach to the battle on Koh Tang.[2] There is a table listing USAF tactical assets in Thailand (p. 49), but nothing similar for the other services. In a footnote, Guilmartin states that U.S. Navy aircraft did not provide air support to the battle on Koh Tang because "carrier-based A-7Es and A-6s were not equipped with radios capable of communicating with the Marines on the beach" (pp. 211-12, text on p. 99). In contrast to the detail on the H-53s, Guilmartin does not explain why U.S. Navy aircraft did not have the capability to support Marine Corps operations in 1975 when, after all, this had been a principal role for U.S. Navy aircraft during the Vietnam War and remained, at least on paper, one of the principal tasks for all naval aviators. In another example, while we learn the names of many of the H-53 pilots, almost none of the involved fighter or reconnaissance pilots receive the same attention. Somewhat in line with the focus on the rescue pilots, A Very Short War has only the briefest references to the strike missions into the Cambodian mainland that occurred in conjunction with the rescue operation.

Less applicable to the substance are some shortcomings in the notes and bibliography, some suggestive of editorial lapses. For example, several works cited in the footnotes never have full citations. Guilmartin refers to a General Accounting Office study on the Mayaguez published in 1976, yet cites it oly through another source and never directly.[3] In some cases, the citations are not strong. In addition to the detailed discussion of the Mayaguez incident, Guilmartin discusses other, frequently rather poorly known, U.S. military operations, such as Operation Babylift--an evacuation of orphans from Vietnam. The key study for "Babylift" (a Military Airlift Command monograph) does not make the footnotes.[4] For Operation Urgent Fury (the invasion of Grenada), the citation is to a 1990 Wall Street Journal article, rather than to any of the numerous books and monographs on the operation.[5]

Thus, A Very Short War is not a perfect work, but it is a very good one. In combination with Christopher Jon Lamb's Belief Systems and Decision Making in the Mayaguez Crisis (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1989), A Very Short War provides a history of the Mayaguez incident that should satisfy all but those with the most profound interest, and the footnotes and bibliography will provide the basis for further reading. In addition, Guilmartin provides enough detail and context for non-participants to gain an understanding into some of the complexities of modern warfare and how Clausewitz's nineteenth-century concept of friction can emerge in a twentieth-century battle.

A Very Short War should be on the reading list of those interested in the command and control of military operations, in the interaction of policy and tactical military activity, and in the modern U.S. military in general. Any library with a collection interest in the modern (U.S.) military should have this on their purchase list. John Guilmartin is an excellent writer with a keen insight into a crucial part of this operation--anyone with the slightest interest will find his book fascinating and worthwhile reading.

Notes

[1] John Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleons: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974). This study of naval developments in the sixteenth century remains one of the most impressive historical studies I have ever read.

[2] For a USMC-focused discussion of the operation, see Maj. George R. Dunham and Col. David A Quinlan, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973-1975 (Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1990), pp. 237-265.

[3] Comptroller General, "The Seizure of the Mayaguez: A Case Study of Crisis Management," a report to the Subcommittee on International Political and Military Affairs, House Committee on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976).

[4] Coy F. Cross II, MAC and Operation Babylift: Air Transport in Support of Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (Scott Air Force Base, Ill.: Military Airlift Command, Office of History, Nov. 1989).

[5] There is a wide range of literature on Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury), which I will not attempt to recreate here. In addition to the footnoting problem, Guilmartin comments on "Urgent Fury" that "Published accounts suggest that inadequate intelligence and the lack of adequate maps were--as with the MAYAGUEZ affair--a major cause of embarrassment" (p. 158). I think that this understates the importance of these problems, as one can point to the lack of adequate maps (for example, no joint maps with gridded squares) as one of the potential causes for some of the friendly fire incidents that occurred during "Urgent Fury."


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## archade (Jul 22, 2010)

Michael K. Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, eds.  Buddhist Warfare. Oxford,  Oxford University Press, 2010.  xi + 257 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-539483-2;, ISBN 978-0-19-539484-9.

Reviewed by Vladimir Tikhonov (University of Oslo)


The Myth of "Nonviolent Buddhism" - Demolished Once Again
Given the frequency with which stories of religious violence appear in the news--be it terrorist atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalist groups, or religiously tinged communal strife--the thesis that religion has an intrinsic potential for violence that time and again erupts in bloodshed seems to be self-evident. However, compared to all other global religions, Buddhism tends to be the one least associated with warfare, even while the Sri Lankan state, constitutionally bound to "foster and protect Buddhism," was conducting a brutally efficient elimination campaign against Tamil insurgency, with the enthusiastic support of its Buddhist community. In fact, "Buddhist warfare" was not unknown to Western observers prior to this--the first works on Japan's militant monks were published already in the late nineteenth century. The myth of "nonviolent Buddhism" persisted, however, owing much to the pacifist leanings of Western Buddhist converts who tended to "see no evil" in their adopted religion, as well as to the widespread tendency to apply "positive Orientalist" stereotypes to Tibet, often seen as a peaceful Shangri-La of sorts in the apologetic writings of Western supporters of its charismatic Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

The new collection edited by Michael Jerryson (Eckerd College, Florida) and Mark Juergensmeyer (University of California, Santa Barbara) will hopefully contribute significantly to demolishing the "nonviolent Buddhism" myth, at least at the level of academic discussion. It persuasively argues that even though in theory Buddhism highlights the inescapably insalubrious karmic consequences of any violence, in practice it functions pretty much like any other religion: From its inception, Buddhism was integrated into a complicated web of power relations; it always attempted to accommodate itself with the pre-existent power hierarchies while preserving a degree of internal autonomy; and it inevitably came to acknowledge, willingly or otherwise, that the powers-that-be use violence to achieve their objectives, which often overlap with those of the Buddhist monastic community. In many cases, the passive acknowledgement of the inexorableness of state violence further developed into active collaboration with state war-making or internal pacification--as long as state bloodletting was seen as also serving Buddhist religious interests.

The collection opens with an introduction by Michael Jerryson which provides a masterfully written outline of Buddhism's ambiguous relations with state violence throughout the course of its history. The gist of its argument is that early Buddhism's dichotomous view of society gave Buddhists little reason to take risks by actively promoting antiwar views certain to alienate state rulers. While the autonomous communities of full-time Buddhist practitioners (_sangha_) were supposed to eschew violence, the mundane world was seen as inherently chaotic and thus in need of "those who administer torture and maiming" (_Vinaya_)--that is, kings. Never tired of admonishing kings to rule in a benevolent way which would render royal violence unnecessary, Buddha tacitly accepted, however, the reality of dog-eat-dog interstate competition--the_ _quid pro quo being what Jerryson justly defines as "monks' immunity to state rules" (p. 11). 
These patterns of Buddhist collaboration with state powers were eventually cemented with the incipience of modern nationalism, as whole nations (Śrī Lanka, Thailand, etc.) were seen now as "Buddhist," their warfare being inescapably legitimized in religious terms. The _sangha_-state dualism, in other words, developed, in the end, into its own negation.

Jerryson's introduction is followed by another, much longer outline on the issue of Buddhism's relation to warfare, Paul Demiéville's (1894-1979) well-known 1957 text, _Buddhism and War_, translated into English by Michelle Kendall (University of California, Santa Barbara). Originally a postscript to a study on the Japanese "warrior monks" (_sōhei_), Demiéville's incisive text highlights the issue of violence in the Japanese Mahāyāna tradition and especially emphasizes the theoretical platform which makes even active monastic participation in violence permissible. As Demiéville makes clear, Buddhism tends to reject the existence of any essential existence of things (_svabhāva_) as such, and Mahāyāna philosophy accordingly privileges "mind"/"consciousness," the questions of the "relative" existence of matter being hotly debated by a variety of theoretical traditions. Thus, in the matter of killing, it is the _intention_ and not the act in itself that is focused upon. As some of the most influential Mahāyāna _sūtra_s (_Ratnakūta Sūtra_, _Yogācārabhūmi,_ etc.) suggest, "killing" is simply a meaningless misconception from an "enlightened" viewpoint (since neither the killer nor the killed have any independent existence) and may be undertaken if intended to prevent a worse misfortune, and done with the best objectives in mind. Demiéville, in effect, points to the dangers inherent in the Buddhist relativizing of the objective world in the situation when Buddhist monks themselves are strongly influenced by conflicting worldly interests. It is a pity, however, that the article's translator left intact Demiéville's use of the antiquated system devised by Séraphin Couvreur (1835-1919) for transcribing Chinese (which used to be in vogue primarily in France), instead of re-transcribing Chinese words into Pinyin (which is used by the other contributors to this collection).

The next article, Stephen Jenkins's (Humboldt State University) research on the Mahāyānist _Ārya-Bodhisattva-gocara-upāyavi__ṣaya-vikurvaṇa-nirdeśa Sūtra_ (the title is translated by Jenkins as _The Noble Teachings  through Manifestations on the Subject of Skilful Means in the Bodhisattva's Field of Activity_), contextualizes the teachings of the _sūtra_ in question and further buttresses Demiéville's argument that the Buddhist emphasis on "good intention" opened the door for a broad spectrum of  violence legitimization, including both war and in criminal justice. The _sūtra _Jenkins analyzes justifies both torture if done with the intention to prevent criminality, and war as _ultima ratio regum_ if conducted with the intention to protect noncombatants. Unfortunately, however, Jenkins does not elaborate in more detail what sort of influence the Chinese and Tibetan translations of this _sūtra_ exerted on Buddhism's political views and activities in Central and East Asia. Buddhist justifications for warfare in supposedly "pacifist" Tibet are dealt with in the following article by Derek Maher (East Carolina University). Focusing on the writings of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-82) in which the Gelug-pa (Yellow Hat sect) leader glorifies his mundane patron, Gushri Khan (1582-1655)--the Khoshut Mongol ruler who effectively established the domination of Gelug-pa's Dalai Lamas over Tibet through a series of wars against competing sects and potentates--Maher shows how the supposedly "Dharma [Buddhist law]-protecting" violence was rationalized as not sinning againstexplicit Buddhist disciplinarian norms. Without ever clearly arguing in favor of violence as such, the Dalai Lama subtly leads his readers to think that once violence is perpetrated by a venerable religious warrior with a clear intention to protect Dharma, then it is justifiable. As the next article, by Oxford University's Vesna Wallace, argues, a very similar logic was also applied to the cruelest forms of criminal justice utilized by secular rulers in Mongolian society after the conversion to Gelug-pa Buddhism in late sixteenth century. Executions by spine-breaking and slicing into pieces, and tortures by clubbing or crushing hands and feet were all justified as long as they were conducted by "Dharma-protecting" authorities with the "compassionate" intention of purifying society. Violence ended up being justified as long as it was seen as the best way of realizing rulers' good intentions in what was perceived as an inherently violent world. While identifying belligerent Gushri Khan as the compassionate bodhisattva Vajrapāni was rarely problematic for supposedly "nonviolent" Tibetan Buddhism, it does prove problematic for many contemporary Western Buddhists, many of whom view their Buddhist faith as an extension of their pacifist convictions. Their voice is represented in the collection by Brian Daizen Victoria (Antioch University), whose article, critically dealing with the appropriation of Zen Buddhism by Japanese militarism forcefully argues that acquiescence to violence completely contradicts the spirit of Buddha's Dharma. The argument is fully plausible, since the emphasis on the inauspicious karmic_ _consequences of violent acts, thought, or speech is more than clear, especially in the early Buddhistliterature. However, if Victoria is to criticize Japanese Buddhists' wartime collaboration with their state, he--as Bernard Faure (Columbia University) persuasively suggests in his "Afterthoughts" probably would have to ultimately extend his criticism to the historical Buddha and his disciples, since it was exactly their attitude of tacitly acknowledging state violence and accepting sponsorship from ruling-class personages directly or indirectly implicated in all sorts of violence that laid the foundation for what Victoria describes as Buddhism's "self-prostitution" in the service of the state (p. 128). Taking this historical background into consideration, the pattern of "mutually beneficial" relations between the Buddhist monastic community and the early Maoist state in China, as described in Xue Yu's (Chinese University of Hong Kong) article on Chinese Buddhists during the 1950-53 Korean War, does not look like a deviation, but rather like a continuation of a time-honored patter strongly rooted in the _habitus_ of the monkhood. The pattern shows regional variations, of course: While donating airplanes to and personally enlisting in the Chinese "volunteer" army "fighting crazy American criminals in Korea" (p. 146) was not seen as problematic for Chinese Mahāyānic monks, the Theravādin Sri Lankan monks, asDaniel Kent (University of Virginia) shows in his contribution, even eschew direct encouragement to kill in their sermons to soldiers (not to mention abstaining from any personal participation in killing), preferring to emphasize instead that the fighting men should kill and die "without unwholesome intentions," so as not to suffer karmic consequences from their "Dharma-protecting war" against Tamil rebels. But, as Michael Jerryson makes clear in his piece on monks' participation in the Thai state's suppression of a Muslim insurgency in the south, it is a sort of "public secret" in Thai society that some monks become ordained while still on military duty and some monasteries house military garrisons in the insurgency-ridden areas. As long as the Thai state is considered a "Buddhist nation," this sort of Buddhist response to the threats facing it makes perfectly logical sense, all the doctrinal skepticism towards violence notwithstanding.       

All in all, Jerryson, Juergensmeyer and their co-authors have produced an extremely valuable, edifying collection which seriously challenges the images of "peacefulness" that Western Buddhists have tended to project onto the religion of their choice. A reader feels persuaded to conclude, as Faure suggests in his "Afterthoughts," that a religion which does not question the (inherently violent) hierarchies of power in the mundane world; which promotes interiorized violence in the form of ascetic practices; and which systematically discriminates against women and habitually demonizes outsiders and rivals, should, in fact, be expected to be violent. What remains to be desired--from Jerryson, Juergensmeyer and their collaborators, as well as other specialists working in this field--is a broader and stronger contextualization of Buddhist violence as part and parcel of a more general tendency of practically all religions to be violent. Religions are symbolic systems that organize the universe in such a way as to make themselves central and powerful--and closing the distance between "power" and "violence" is only a question of time, however "compassionate" the axiology of a given religion might originally have been. The present collection shows us very clearly the dangers inherent in privileging one religion--even a most "compassionate"-looking one--in relation to others.


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## archade (Aug 12, 2010)

Thomas J. Craughwell. The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in History: How Genghis Khan's Mongols Almost Conquered the World. Beverly: Fair Winds Press, 2010. Illustrations. 272 pp., ISBN 978-1-59233-398-1.

Reviewed by Timothy May (North Georgia College &amp; State University)


Long Titles and Lavish Illustrations

As one might gather from the title of Thomas J. Craughwell’s book on the Mongol Empire, it is intended for the general public. Indeed, from a scholarly perspective there is little to recommend--there are no new interpretations of events or analysis. While the sources are fairly up to date, the author relies on equal parts popular works as to scholarly books. Also, the book has numerous errors. So why is it being reviewed? Other than the fact that I was asked to review it, the book must be judged for its merits. Furthermore, it is a book such as this that first awakened my interest (and I suspect others’) in the Mongol Empire, and for that reason alone it should receive some attention.

The book is organized in sixteen chapters. The first eleven deal with the life and conquest of Chinggis Khan. Craughwell uses the “G-word,” or Genghis Khan. I assume he makes this choice because the popular audience might be more familiar with this name or rather title and would become confused with the more proper Chinggis Khan. Why the publishing industry perpetuates this is beyond me: how many famous Mongolians do they think the American public knows? The second half of the book discusses the reign of Ögödei, Güÿük, and Möngke, using many of the now standard tropes for chapters, such as the title of chapter 13, “How One Man’s Death Saved Europe from Destruction.” The final two chapters then focus on Kublai Khan and Mongol rule in China, with little to no attention given to the rest of the Mongol Empire after 1260. The book itself is lavishly illustrated using artwork from the period as well as latter woodcuts, lithographs, and old maps. Thus it is colorful and eye-catching. Readers will be drawn to it for this reason. It also has useful sidebars that provide information on tangential aspects of the empire, such as the role of shaman. 

Unfortunately, the book is, as stated earlier, rife with errors. Indeed, because of the lack of footnotes, it is difficult to determine from where the author derived his errors--did he misread the sources, come to his own conclusions, or simply repeat another’s error? Part of the problem arises from the attempt to summarize a complicated series of events while also focusing on a few key figures. For instance, the author discusses the conflict between Chinggis Khan and his blood-brother and rival, Jamukha. In Craughwell’s book this conflict is continual, but he neglects to include that after 1201, Jamukha was only a bit player in the affairs of Mongolia and the conflict was between Chinggis Khan and more powerful polities (pp. 75-77).

Other more factual errors also occur. He has Senggüm, a Kereit prince, dying in the Gobi Desert instead of in the kingdom of Xixia (p. 80). Craughwell also indicates that Ögödei was selected heir because Chaghadai and Jochi (all were sons of Chinggis Khan) quarreled after Chinggis Khan died in 1227. Although it is true that Ögödei was chosen due to the quarrelling of Jochi and Chaghadai, the problem is that Jochi died before Chinggis Khan did (probably in 1225) and that Ögödei was named the successor as early as 1219. Another factual error is that Craughwell has Chinggis Khan stopping at his capital of Karakorum, although the city was built during the later reign of Ögödei (p. 158). 

Craughwell’s interpretations of events are also a bit disconcerting. In discussing the Mongol invasions of Georgia, he mentions that the initial invasion by Subotai in 1220 not only was undertaken as part of the pursuit of the Kharazmian Shah and as a reconnaissance, but was also done to gather intelligence for an invasion of Europe (p. 167). While the Mongols certainly did gather intelligence, this was standard operating procedure. Although this may seem a minor issue, Craughwell’s assertion gives the impression that the Mongols intended to invade Europe as early in 1220. There is no indication of this anywhere in the documentary sources or from an evaluation of Mongol actions. Furthermore, intelligence gathered in Georgia had very little practical use in Hungary or Poland (both targets of the Mongol invasion twenty years later). 

So, what value does the book have? As I mentioned, the illustrations alone make the book worth a perusal. My criticisms come from being a specialist on the Mongol Empire, but for a sixteen-year-old or a casual reader, it is unlikely to alter their perception of the Mongols. Craughwell writes well enough and is likely to engage the interest of a reader so that they then read a book or two listed in his bibliography. And then, perhaps when the high school student is in college he or she will take a course on the Mongols or if that person is an adult, perhaps they will read a more scholarly work. Thus, while I would never assign the book to a class, for a person who has an interest in the Mongol Empire, this book will suffice as an introduction as it is well written, nicely illustrated, and has the general flow of events correct even though some of the facts and interpretations are misleading on close inspection.


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## archade (Aug 12, 2010)

Sarah-Jane Corke. *U.S. Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945-53*. Studies in Intelligence Series. London: Routledge, 2008. ix + 240 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-42077-8.

Reviewed by Mark Montesclaros


Lessons Not Learned

Sarah-Jane Corke provides new insight on policy and intelligence planning during the Truman administration, specifically in the area of covert operations and psychological warfare during the period 1945-53. Benefiting from the flood of documents recently declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the author examines in detail the inner workings of the Cold War-era Washington interagency, as it tried to come to grips with new threats and the means to combat them. In doing so, Corke makes some strong assertions that merit serious attention. Corke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Corke’s primary contention is that under President Harry Truman, the United States had no overarching, coherent strategy for conducting its Cold War foreign policy. This, in turn, had a direct and largely negative impact on the planning and execution of covert operations, which, in turn, had an abysmal record of success, particularly in Eastern Europe. “Covert operations,” the subject of the author’s work, is an umbrella term used to describe U.S.-sponsored activities against adversaries or in support of friends for which U.S. government involvement is not evident to the general public, or which can be plausibly disclaimed. Corke also uses the terms “political warfare” and “psychological warfare” extensively, the former a more encompassing term while the latter may refer to more specific operations including propaganda, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and contact with underground groups in adversary territory. The author is careful to point out the nuances and contexts behind use of these terms, and explains their evolution effectively, as they came to be associated, at times, with a particular agency within the Washington national security bureaucracy.

The author argues her thesis by interweaving several themes, each of which is devoted a chapter in her work. Foremost is that Cold War policy under Truman was at best ambiguously stated and responsive primarily to internal vice external factors. Corke interestingly (and counterintuitively) maintains that Soviet policy was much more a result of U.S. domestic politics and bureaucratic infighting than it was based on Soviet action and American counteraction. In the vacuum of ambiguous policy, the various institutions charged with national security policy jockeyed for power and influence in the realm of covert operations and psychological warfare, and in doing so often operated at cross purposes, resulting in flawed policy and failed operations in the field.

Corke also contends that the key organizations involved in national security decision making--the National Security Council (NSC), State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA--largely ran amok and rudderless, all influenced by the relative inability of the Truman administration to corral them. The CIA, for example, was singularly influenced by the legacy of Wild Bill Donovan, its founder and soul. Donovan’s penchant for derring-do and initiative above all else produced a climate that rewarded action vice inaction, regardless of results on the ground.

Of course, Donovan was but one strong character in a narrative replete with larger-than-life personalities--including George Kennan, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, Paul Nitze, James Forrestal, etc. It is no wonder that a single entity or personality was unable to harness the collective energy of the interagency, to include President Truman, and provide a single, unifying vision for U.S.-Soviet policy. In military parlance, what was lacking was unity of command and, perhaps more important, unity of purpose in interagency efforts at the time.

Interestingly, frequent and recurring administration attempts to give structure to covert operations and psychological warfare only resulted in further confusion and mismanagement. Corke maintains that such organizations as the Psychological Strategy Board, specifically designed to remove gaps between national policy and operations on the ground, only served to cause further interagency squabbles and confusion. In the end, nearly all of the interagency structures designed to improve the efficacy of covert operations were doomed to inefficiency based on the continuing failure to reconcile visions and agendas of the participating agencies and their heads. Thus, the fundamental strategic problem--getting the “ends” right, was never reconciled, leaving the “means”--caused psychological warfare and covert operations to flounder.

The magnitude of the tragedy in failed covert operations during the period will most likely never be known. The author uses as one case in point the curiously named Operation Valuable (later Project BGFIEND), a covert operation designed to destabilize the government of Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha between 1949 and 1954. Scores of commandos, consisting of Albanian refugees and Albanians of American descent, were inserted into the country to drum up popular support and initiate a potential overthrow of the Hoxha regime. Despite numerous failures and setbacks, CIA operations continued and were even expanded several times. Corke notes that between two hundred and one thousand people died during these unsuccessful operations, which accentuated “the complete breakdown between policy and operations that existed during these years” (p. 99).

Perhaps what readers will find most interesting about the book is the nuanced view of Cold War policy and strategy, along with their attendant national security documents. Those familiar primarily with the policy of containment and NSC-68 may be surprised to learn about the various policy gradations proposed, to include “liberation,” “rollback,” and “Titoism.” These competing strategic visions had their various political and interagency proponents throughout the period and addressed the seminal question of how to deal with Soviet aggression. Likewise, readers may be fascinated by Corke’s meticulous dissection of interagency bureaucratic politics and the policies they produced. The author does a thorough job of explaining how and why the interagency acted the way it did, and how competing personalities and visions resulted in ambiguous policy and multiple interpretations of what the United States was trying to accomplish. As a result, covert operations and psychological warfare continued to thrive, often without government oversight or checks and balances.    

Corke’s work has obvious relevance in the modern context, as multiple government agencies struggle to define national security policy and outcomes in the post-9/11 world. It underscores that there is a difference between lessons and lessons learned; that is, national security policymakers must consciously decide whether to incorporate what is learned from the past or choose to ignore such knowledge. There has to be a formal mechanism for this to happen; otherwise, bureaucracies will continue to churn out flawed policies. Next, the author clearly demonstrates the impact of domestic considerations on the foreign policymaking process. As a teacher of the national security strategy making process, it is all too often the case that one focuses on external causes and events vice internal happenings to explain how and why policy is made. Corke clearly shows that Cold War-era policymaking was largely done in the context of domestic politics and bureaucratic infighting rather than as a response to Soviet actions.

Additionally, the author’s painstaking analysis of the interagency process during 1945-53 clearly demonstrates the difficulty in formulating national security policy in a democracy. The author presents a detailed and much more nuanced view of U.S. Cold War policy, one that goes far beyond well-known directives, such as the seminal NSC-68, and such personalities as Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Nitze. Her explanation of the labyrinthine national security decision-making architecture under Truman is of great value to those studying the interagency process and anyone interested in how national security policy is formulated. Corke’s work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Cold War policymaking, adding insightful depth as well as breadth.


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## archade (Jan 28, 2011)

*Gilberto N. Villahermosa.* _Honor and Fidelity: The 65th Infantry in Korea, 1950-1953._  Washington DC:  Center of Military History, United States Army, 2009. xv + 329 pp., ISBN 978-0-16-083324-3.
*Reviewed by* Thomas E. Hanson


*The Borinqueneers in Korea* 
_Honor and Fidelity_ joins an ever-growing  list of regimental histories covering twentieth-century American  military history. What sets it apart from many recent offerings is its  role in expanding our understanding of organizational evolution during  long-term commitment to combat operations. Author Gilbert N.  Villahermosa, a serving army officer, has done a masterful job detailing  the experiences of a unique outfit in the post-World War II U.S. Army.  Through archival research, exhaustive interviews with surviving  participants, and an engaging narrative, Villahermosa forcefully argues  that the devolution of the 65th Infantry Regiment's combat effectiveness  and cohesion resulted from both internal and external factors, the  cumulative effects of which led directly to the mass combat refusals  seen in late fall 1952.
The 65th Infantry was a typical Regular Army unit in  1950, in that it lacked a significant percentage of authorized  personnel, equipment of all types, and adequate training areas. It was  atypical, however, in that it was one of only two segregated regiments  remaining in the Regular Army, the other being the all-black 24th  Infantry Regiment on occupation duty in Japan. Although the army had no  policy restricting assignment of Hispanics in general or Puerto Ricans  in particular, the 65th had always been explicitly Puerto Rican. During  the first year of the regiment's service in Korea, this was, in the  author's view, a source of strength. Villahermosa argues that the ethnic  ties among soldiers and a deep sense of trust and respect between  leaders and the led allowed the unit to fight effectively even under the  hellish conditions prevailing in northern Korea in December 1950. As  time passed, however, and attrition and rotation brought new infusions  of manpower into the regiment, this trust and respect eroded as more  non-English-speaking soldiers from Puerto Rico filled the ranks of the  regiment while fewer and fewer Spanish-speaking noncommissioned officers  (NCOs) and officers were assigned.
Villahermosa ably depicts this devolution of  effectiveness in the chapters covering the regiment's defeat at Outpost  Kelly in late summer of 1952, and the mass combat refusals that followed  at Jackson Heights in October. Following a long period in corps  reserve, the lackluster regimental commander Colonel Juan C.  Cordero-Davila failed to make adequate plans or provide adequate  supervision during the attack to seize Outpost Kelly, resulting in  piecemeal defeats by the Chinese that reduced the number of  combat-experienced leaders at the company level and lowered the morale  of the soldiers. The fact that all parties continued to believe that  Puerto Rican soldiers should be segregated into their own regiment  exacerbated the disconnect between the soldiers and their leaders. By  late 1952, there were few NCOs or officers in the Puerto Rican National  Guard who had not already served in Korea; Major General Robert L.  Dulaney's calls for more Puerto Rican leaders remained unanswered.  Although Puerto Rican soldiers continued to fill the 65th's ranks, fewer  and fewer spoke any English. Because several of the officers both spoke  no Spanish and appeared disdainful of Puerto Rican cultural  sensitivities, by late 1952 a gap of catastrophic proportions had opened  between platoon leaders and company commanders on the one hand and the  soldiers and even NCOs whom they led on the other hand. Following the  regiment's humiliation at Outpost Kelly, a Continental officer replaced  Cordero-Davila as regimental commander. Although Colonel Chester B.  DeGavre had served with the 65th prior to World War II and spoke  Spanish, one of his first orders prohibited his men from wearing  mustaches "until they proved their manhood" (p. 239). Predictably,  DeGavre's order had the opposite effect from what was intended. And  because few of the leaders could adequately explain the purpose of  orders issued to their non-English-speaking soldiers, almost no one  outside of DeGavre's command group understood that his emphasis on  discipline and appearance resulted directly from his fears that the  regiment would be inactivated or otherwise discorporated as a Puerto  Rican unit if their combat effectiveness did not improve. Unfortunately  for DeGavre and the regiment, events at Jackson Heights seemed to  validate prejudices of some members of the 3d Division and IX Corps  staffs. Not only was the regiment unable to retain possession of the  outpost, but repeated counterattacks also failed when substantial  numbers of Puerto Rican soldiers disobeyed the orders of their officers  and refused to fight.
Villahermosa concludes that the regiment's decline  over the course of its years in Korea is directly attributable to three  primary factors. First, the army's insistence on maintaining the 65th as  a "segregated" regiment meant that there would never be a pool of  experienced officers and NCOs of sufficient size to sustain a high level  of combat effectiveness over the long term. And because the army had  never restricted assignment of Hispanic soldiers the way it had for  black soldiers, there was no guarantee that individual Puerto Rican  replacements would be assigned to the 65th Infantry Regiment. Second,  senior leaders at the division and corps level ignored the widespread  inability of most replacement Puerto Rican soldiers to speak English, as  demonstrated by the complete lack of any guidance issued to the 65th or  3d Infantry Division to remedy the problem. Major General Dulaney could  not have been ignorant of the near-universal use of Spanish by members  of the 65th Infantry Regiment during his almost daily visits to the  regimental command post. But rather than scour the ranks of his division  for combat-experienced bilingual officers and NCOs, the only program  that received any emphasis was the accelerated promotion to sergeant of  junior enlisted soldiers already in the regiment--a program that did  nothing to address the continuing inability of most platoon leaders and  company commanders to communicate orders effectively in battle. Third  and most important, the decision to place Colonel Cordero-Davila in  command of the regiment and Major General Dulaney's failure to mentor  that officer once his leadership deficiencies became apparent directly  led to the lax discipline that allowed the Chinese to overrun Outpost  Kelly. Not only did Cordero-Davila demonstrate an ignorance bordering on  stupidity in the face of numerous indicators of a major Chinese attack,  but he also displayed a crippling indecisiveness long after it was  apparent that a robust counterattack was necessary to restore the  outpost line. Instead, Dulaney failed to issue any directives to his  less-experienced subordinate and he continued to underwrite  Cordero-Davila's poor performance until he was himself replaced.
Villahermosa's work provides an outstanding  examination of the effects of sustained combat at both the macro and  micro level. The work is firmly based on archival research from both the  National Archives and the U.S. Army Military History Institute,  augmented by numerous interviews with veterans from all three phases of  the 65th's participation in the Korean War. The themes Villahermosa  highlights in this work--organizational policy, leadership, arguments  over the wisdom of ethnic identity as a basis for combat effectiveness,  and the impact of politics on army policy--will resonate with scholars,  professional soldiers, and the general public. This work has a place in a  number of academic programs and should be required reading for all  military pre-commissioning programs.


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## archade (Jan 28, 2011)

*Daniel Branch.* _Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization._  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 250 pp. , ISBN 978-0-521-11382-3; , ISBN 978-0-521-13090-5.


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## archade (Jan 30, 2011)

*"Why Some Wars Never*
*End: The Stories of the Longest*
*Conflicts in History" (Fairwinds*
*Press, 2010)*
Source: _Special to HNN _(12-11-10)
[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of _The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation _(Oxford, 2003) among other books, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at
American History Now.]


This is a clever book by a clever writer, produced by a clever publisher. To work backwards: Fairwinds Press is an imprint of the Quayside Group, a house with roots in instructional materials. The evident ability to produce lavishly illustrated books at a surprisingly inexpensive price $20 list price (a strategy that in part appears to be derived from shrewdly chosen photographs, art and maps in the public domain) has
resulted in a series of oversized trade paperbacks that are nevertheless easy to tote and browse. Many of these books
are authored by Cummins, a former editor for Book of the Month Club -- yes, it's still in business -- who has become a one-man cottage industry of books on military history. _Why Some Wars Never End _is the latest in a string of works that range across time in a case study approach (three of which were contributed by other writers). These particular case studies stretch from the failed Persian attempts to subdue Greece in the fifth century BCE to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Cummins divides them into five sections consisting of 2-4 chapters. These are: wars of empire, religious wars, guerrilla wars, nationalist struggles, and wars of chaos. This taxonomy isn't airtight; one wonders, for example, why the Ottoman wars of 1354-1529 are considered wars of empire rather than religion, given that the struggle was largely between Muslims and Christians. One possible reason is balance: a virtual sequel, the Balkan struggles from 1912-2001, also included, are classified under a nationalism rubric. Some of these conflicts have what may be regarded as arguable periodization; indeed, the chapter on civil wars in Guatemala (1944-1996), for example, makes the subject a virtual theme of the chapter in its own right. In any case, the taxonomy here is less the point than in brief chapters that consist of an opening anecdote followed by a regional overview and then a series of military encounters. Recurring themes include the likelihood that installing a puppet regime in any conflict tends to prolong it, as well as the role of technology and geography in determining the cast and length of wars. Cummins' sources are almost entirely secondary, but the best kind -- from John Keegan to Stanley Karnow, with a sprinkling of quality journalism from Thomas Friedman to Robert Kaplan. You're not going to get a whole lot of original interpretation here, but that's not the point. What you do get is editorial versatility: this is a handy reference guide, a source of brief readings -- any of these chapters is readily imaginable as a night's reading to accompany some larger pedagogical objective -- or a book that can be read in its entirety (as I did) with satisfaction. These are not the kind of books that tend to be honored in a profession that prizes original research and interpretive novelty. But when done well, they deserve recognition.


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## archade (May 8, 2012)

*Edward A. Lynch.* _The Cold War's Last Battlefield: Reagan, the Soviets, and Central America._ Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. xix + 329 pp., ISBN 978-1-4384-3949-5.
*Reviewed by* Thomas R. Maddux (CSU Northridge)
*Published on* H-Diplo (May, 2012)
*Ronald Reagan and the Central American Conflict*
The “American Lake” in the Caribbean and Central America erupted with Marxist and leftist challenges to long-term authoritarian regimes in the late 1970s and to the United States under the leadership of both Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Carter responded first with an unsuccessful effort to find a viable middle ground between traditional oligarchical-military rule and the leftist insurgencies that looked to Fidel Castro and Castro’s Soviet patron for support. El Salvador began to erupt after the 1972 election in which the military denied victory to a coalition led by José Napoléon Duarte of the Christian Democratic Party. When the military launched a wave of repression against moderates, guerrilla organizations launched expanding operations with support from popular organizations of peasants, workers, students, and Catholic Church leaders. The long-term Somoza regime in Nicaragua, currently under the leadership of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, also began to face serious challenges following an earthquake in 1972 and mounting opposition from such leaders as Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was assassinated in 1978, and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had emerged in 1961 in response to Castro’s success in Cuba. Somoza launched a wave of terror in a failed effort to wipe out the FSLN, and the Sandinistas successfully reached out to the moderate opposition. In July 1979, Somoza went into exile and a provisional government with a five-member junta took over in Managua. A few months earlier on the island of Grenada, in the Windward Islands at the southern entrance to the Caribbean, a group of radicals led by Maurice Bishop and his New Jewel Movement overthrew the authoritarian regime of Sir Edward M. Gairy and looked to Castro for support. In 1980 in Suriname, on the northern coast of South America east of Venezuela, Desi Bouterse led a group of army sergeants to overthrow the elected government, and by 1982 Bouterse had executed some leading citizens and appeared to be aligning with Bishop and Castro.[1]
Edward A. Lynch approaches the Reagan administration’s response to the Central American conflict as both a participant in the Reagan White House and as a political scientist at Hollins University. After working as an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, Lynch entered the White House’s Office of Public Liaison in December 1983 as a consultant on Central America and specialized in giving talks to visiting delegations on Central America and drafting newsletter contributions to the _White House Digest_ on aspects of the Central American debate in the United States. Lynch experienced a good deal of frustration in getting the State Department to review and sign off on his reports and ended up completing only seven issues of the _Digest_ during his thirteen months of service in the White House. While in his position, he gained an inside perspective on the never-ending conflicts within the Reagan administration, especially those concerned with policy on Nicaragua. 
Lynch uses public U.S. documents, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sources, newspaper articles, and some secondary sources. However, Lynch does not include citations for quotations from any of his sources, a bibliography, or footnotes to support his assessments, especially those concerning his thesis on the conflict within the administration, offering the explanation that “it is far less confusing to most readers, and far more conducive to an appealing narrative” to omit footnotes (p. xiv). Lynch’s approach, however, limits the usefulness of his study to scholars and undermines the persuasiveness of several of his major themes.
Lynch endorses Reagan’s assessment of the Central American challenge to the United States as a top-down threat from the Soviet Union: “Reagan believed that the Soviet Union, working mostly through Cuba, had taken a strong interest in Central America and was determined to use the conflicts in the region to weaken, and possibly threaten the United States” (pp. viii-ix). According to Lynch, Reagan considered El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Grenada as opening challenges in his desire to roll back the advance of the Soviet Union and Communism: “Must we let ... Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, all become additional Cubas, new outposts for Soviet brigades?” (p. 60). The clear emphasis of Reagan, which Lynch endorses, was on a Soviet priority to weaken the United States in its own backyard, and once Communist allies were entrenched in Nicaragua and El Salvador to move on the other Central American states and ultimately threaten Mexico. The Soviet Union through the 1980s provided aid to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, insurgents in El Salvador, and Bishop in Grenada, just as it supported leftist regimes in Angola and Ethiopia and elsewhere. Recent studies on Soviet policy, however, suggest growing disillusionment with a number of these new allies by the 1980s, even if Soviet officials on the scene kept pushing for more resources to help build reliable Communist states and to take advantage of revolutionary situations.[2]
What the Reagan administration downplayed, with Lynch’s agreement, were the domestic sources for the conflicts in Central America as decaying oligarchies aligned with military allies to maintain dominance over peasants and growing urban middle and working classes. Several studies have emphasized that this conflict reaches back to the Mexican Revolution, a conflict between the Left and the Right with violence on both sides. Rightists and oligarchs aligned with the military resorted to violence when popular sectors of society moved to organize and gain political influence and opportunities for their supporters. While Lynch recognizes the ensuing violence and its impact on El Salvador and Nicaragua (he could also have mentioned Guatemala, which is not covered in the book), he minimizes its significance, particularly in influencing American opinion and congressional views against the policies of the Reagan administration on the Central American conflicts.[3]
Lynch offers a favorable assessment of President Reagan’s policies toward Central America, including the U.S. intervention in Grenada in 1983 to rescue American medical students before they became hostages as the New Jewel Movement collapsed after the murder of Bishop. Despite considerable disagreement within the Reagan administration and substantial public and congressional concerns about the United States getting involved in another conflict like Vietnam in El Salvador, Reagan sent a limited number of military advisors to assist the El Salvadorian army and obtained increasing amounts of military aid from Congress. As Lynch emphasizes, “on El Salvador, the argument within the administration was over the best means for obtaining a similar end,” that of preventing a Communist victory (p. 87). Reagan faced more difficulties on Nicaragua, with disputes among his leading foreign policy advisors and shifting opposition from Democrats in Congress, which produced a “war” in Washington. Lynch is critical of Reagan for his inability to manage the conflict among his advisors, and for his approval of a covert program of aid to an anti-Sandinista force, labeled the “Contras” by the Sandinistas, versus a public program that, Lynch suggests, went against Reagan’s own instincts: “Reagan saw guerrillas fighting a Communist government as forces for freedom and had a hard time understanding why his advisors did not want him to talk about it” (p. 88). As Lynch emphasizes, Reagan did not offer a public rationale for supporting the Contras until May 1984, although Lynch does suggest that Washington realized that Honduras, a necessary base/sanctuary for the Contras, insisted on “plausible deniability” with respect to its involvement (p. 108).
The Reagan administration’s maneuvering with Congress on Nicaragua and aid to the Contras takes up a significant portion of Lynch’s study. Lynch examines the first Boland amendment in 1982, introduced by Representative Edward Boland (Democrat from Massachusetts) to limit aid to the Contras to the interdiction of arms to the El Salvadorian insurgents, through the Iran Contra affair and final negotiations in 1987-88. Lynch admits that the White House took a risky position of accepting the amendment even as Reagan and the conservatives wanted to get rid of the Sandinistas. When CIA involvement in the mining of harbors in Nicaragua emerged in April 1984, a prolonged battle led to another Boland amendment in October that banned the use of governmental funds by the CIA, the Defense Department, and any U.S. intelligence agency to support the Contras. Lynch implies that Reagan should have vetoed the legislation for “with the stroke of his pen, Reagan could have avoided the scandal that nearly destroyed his presidency” (p. 169). By June 1985, the White House had moved from defeat to gain approval of twenty-seven million dollars in nonmilitary aid and initiated plans to regain military assistance.
To keep the Contras as a viable force, Reagan had also asked his cabinet and National Security Council (NSC) to find aid for the Contras through legal means until he could persuade Congress to resume funding. Since the NSC was not specifically named in the Boland amendment, Richard McFarlane, the NSC advisor, and enterprising staff members like Oliver North went to work soliciting private funds, diverting funds from the trading of arms for hostages with Iran, and creating a private group called “The Enterprise” to get arms and funds to the Contras. “Reagan should have known better,” concludes Lynch, who points to the president’s management style and his failure to have a responsible official overseeing aid to the Contras to make sure that his administration was staying within the law (pp. 214).
Lynch devotes considerable attention to the internal conflict within the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s over policy toward El Salvador initially and then Nicaragua. Although Lynch recognizes that many factors shaped the conflict, such as personality clashes, different views on what tactics and strategy would be successful, and institutional, bureaucratic conflicts, he highlights throughout the study the clash between a preference for natural allies versus leveraged allies. Foreign policy elites, according to Lynch, strove for leveraged allies, leaders and states dependent on the United States for various forms of assistance and willing to defer to U.S. wishes. Lynch considers the Somozan dictators to be good example of this relationship. Natural allies represented economically prosperous and democratic states that would align with each other and the United States without having to be in a state of dependency. Lynch puts Secretary of State George Schultz and the Department of State in the leveraged camp and Reagan and his conservative advisors in the natural camp.
Lynch emphasizes this concept throughout his study. He discusses bureaucratic interests and the defense of prerogatives in such cases as the persistent conflict between the NSC and State Department on managing policy as well as the nature of the policy itself. However, Lynch’s thesis is weakened by the absence of citations and some of his unsupported assertions on this issue. An example of Lynch’s unsupported speculation appears in a discussion regarding McFarlane not being concerned about a Communist Nicaragua since the “danger from Nicaragua could force its neighbors to accept dependence on the United States as a necessary evil” (p. 83). Lynch poses the natural ally camp that wanted to free Nicaragua from Sandinista control with William Clark, an NSC advisor; Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador; the CIA director, William Casey; and the NSC specialist on Latin American, Constantine Menges, against State Department leaders, such as Thomas O. Enders, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, 1981-83, along with Schultz and several of his special negotiators. The latter figure is a major target for Lynch who asserts that Schultz wanted to make “sure that the U.S.-funded contras did not win” and that “they were, at most, a way of stopping arms shipments to El Salvador and a lever for bringing the Sandinistas to the bargaining table” (p. 114).
When the Contadora group of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama initiated a peace process in January 1984, the Reagan administration faced another challenge to its scrambling campaign to maintain congressional funding for the Contras, which created a new source of conflict among Reagan’s advisors. Schultz supported the negotiations, as opposed to various conservatives and Lynch himself who argues that only force or economic collapse would have led the Sandinistas to negotiate. “Schultz and the leveraged ally faction,” Lynch asserts, wanted containment of the Sandinistas versus Reagan who wanted the removal of the Sandinistas and assumed that free elections would produce this result (pp. 160-161). In his memoir, _Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State_, Schultz offers a contrasting view of his stance on Nicaragua and Washington’s strategy in which he emphasizes military pressure on the Sandinistas, a negotiating track to “reach an agreement if we could,” and to maintain support from Congress and the United States’ Central American allies, as well as Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.[4] Schultz found himself in a never-ending battle over Nicaragua with Clark and the NSC staff, especially Menges, who opposed his efforts at working on a joint approach to El Salvador and Nicaragua with Mexico. Clark tried to control negotiations on Central America and maneuvered approval of the CIA-assisted mining of Nicaraguan harbors around Schultz’s objections. When McFarlane replaced Clark as NSC advisor, Schultz urged him to keep the NSC staff out of operations and focused on coordination. Schultz faced stubborn opposition to any negotiations with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in Managua in June 1984 and sustained criticism against any follow-up talks from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger; Casey of the CIA; and NSC staff members Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Menges. When Schultz obtained Reagan’s agreement to move forward, Schultz discovered that the NSC staff had produced a National Security Decision Directive signed by Reagan that went against what Reagan had approved. By January 1985, Schultz recommended that the talks be suspended as Managua had backed away from any agreements that would comply with the Contadora agenda or Washington’s demands.[5]
Lynch ably covers the endgame in Nicaragua from the creation of several plans for negotiations between the Sandinistas and Contras in August 1987 through the election in February 1990 in which, to the surprise of many observers and officials, Violetta Chamorro defeated Ortega. Lynch interweaves various plans including Reagan’s agreement with the Democratic Speaker of the House James Wright that the external powers, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States would suspend aid to the Sandinistas and Contras and in return the Sandinistas would restore all civil rights and liberties in Nicaragua and initiate preparations for a supervised election. The Reagan-Wright plan was similar to what President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica had proposed and which was supported by the other Central American presidents. Lynch fairly evaluates the maneuvering on all sides, from conservatives who denounced Reagan for giving up on a successful march by the Contras into Managua to kick the Sandinistas out, to Reagan’s concerns about Democrats cutting off all funding for the Contras and undermining their pressure on the Sandinistas, and to Ortega’s scrambling efforts, in the face of declining Soviet and Cuban assistance, to keep the Contras and the civilian opposition in Nicaragua from uniting and defeating the Sandinistas.
The main weakness of Lynch’s evaluation is his emphasis on the leveraged ally faction led by Secretary Schultz and bolstered by Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. In discussing the White House response to the Arias plan in August 1987, Lynch contrasts Reagan’s determination to achieve democratization in Nicaragua to that of Schultz, who, according to Lynch, still favored containment of the Sandinistas and the leveraged ally faction that supposedly feared a Contra military victory. In contrast, Secretary Schulz in his memoir emphasizes both his close cooperation with Reagan to achieve a negotiated settlement that would lead to an election against the continuing resistance and the criticism of conservatives including his own Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams and “hard liners” in Congress who wanted to continue military aid to the Contras and defeat the Sandinistas rather than trust Washington’s involvement in the negotiating efforts led by Arias and the Central American leaders.[6] With respect to the final results in Nicaragua, Lynch continues the same critical emphasis on the leveraged ally faction that took over with Bush and Baker and made sure that Nicaragua would be economically dependent on the United States: “To save Nicaragua from Communism, which is what Reagan set out to do, he ended up surrendering it to the leveraged ally faction of his administration” (p. 284). Lynch views Chamorro’s victory in 1990 and refusal to overturn Sandinista legislation and displace Humberto Ortega as head of the army as she maneuvered among the different political factions to avoid a resumption of military conflict as a final victory for the leveraged ally faction, since Nicaragua “would remain an economic basket case, heavily dependent on U.S. aid, and with a president who would come to depend on U.S. officials to protect her from the frequent encroachments on her power by the Sandinista holdovers” (p. 301).
In the _Cold War’s Last Battlefield_, Lynch has provided a revisionist assessment of Reagan’s policies toward El Salvador and Nicaragua that would have more credibility if he had examined the indigenous sources of the conflict as opposed to his endorsement of Reagan’s top-down Cold War emphasis on Soviet and Cuban designs. The study would have been further improved by the inclusion of citations, especially those that would support Lynch’s emphasis on the conflict between the natural ally and leveraged ally factions in the Reagan administration.
Notes
[1]. For the Central American background and Carter’s response, see William M. LeoGrande, _Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992_ (Chapel Hill, 1998), 10-72. Edgar F. Raines Jr. has the most documented study on Grenada in _The Rucksack War: U.S. Army Operational Logistics in Grenada, 1983_ (Washington DC: Center of Military History, 2010). Secretary of State George Schultz discusses Suriname in _Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State_ (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1993), 292-297; and Lynch reviews the Central American situation on pages 12-21.
[2]. See Jonathan Haslam, _Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the War_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 315-317, 330-332, which emphasizes the role of Cuba as a conduit for Soviet aid after 1980 and leading supporter of the Sandinistas; and Vladislav M. Zubok, _A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 314, 331.
[3]. Several recent studies that explore the domestic conflicts in Latin America as well as the impact of U.S. policies include Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., _A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Hal Brands, _Latin America’s Long Cold War_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Stephen G. Rabe, _The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[4]. Schultz, _Turmoil and Triumph_, 292.
[5]. Ibid., 298-305, 410-428. Menges makes a similar complaint against State Department officials and Schultz that they did not follow Reagan’s policy decisions and pursued their own approaches especially on Nicaragua. See Constantine C. Menges, _Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan’s Foreign Policy_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 94-96, 117-129, 151-166.
[6]. See Schultz, _Turmoil and Triumph_, 959-969.


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