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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.