the french library

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

Reviewed for H-War by Jean Morin, Independent Scholar

A Flawed Plan from the Start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

[1]. Brian Villa, Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid_ (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1989).
 
Jeff Guy. The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. xii + 276 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography, index, ISBN 978-1-86914-048-9.

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

War, Law, and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

[2]. In 2007, this book was a nominee on the long list for the prestigious Alan Paton Award for nonfiction. For more information on the lectures and the book, see the Campbell Collections at http://campbell.ukzn.ac.za/?q=taxonomy/term/1221
 
Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, ISBN 978-0748622979, 978-0748622986.

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

War and Memorial Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each chapter has end notes, and the book has a thematic bibliography. Most of the literature cited is in French, so the book gives the non-French reader an introduction to the state of the field in that country. The translation is easy to read quickly, despite a handful of awkward passages that may also be in the original. The book would make a good general survey for undergraduate use in classes on war and society, or Western cultural history.
 
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.
 
Niall Ferguson. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. lxxi + 808 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-14-311239-6.

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

An Awfully Bloody Awful Half-Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

[7]. See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), parts 1 and 2; and
Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6-30.
 
Augustus Richard Norton. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. vi + 187 pp. Pictures, maps, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-691-13124-5.

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

Hizbullah: The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

[1]. The Cairo Agreement (CA) was signed on November 3, 1969 between Lebanon and the PLO granting the latter license to launch attacks from south Lebanon against Israel. The Lebanese parliament's annulment of the CA and all its corollaries were published in the Official Gazette on June 18, 1987 under law number 87/25.
 
James A. Tyner. The Business of War: Workers, Warriors, and Hostages in Occupied Iraq. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. viii + 152 pp. Bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-7546-4791-1.

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

What Kind of War Does Neoliberalism Make?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

[1]. Walter Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings_ (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 352.
 
Richard K. Betts. Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, September 2007. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13888-8 (cloth).

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

Introduction by Joshua Rovner, Williams College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 See for example, John Mueller, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?" Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006, and his Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006).
 
Richard K. Betts. Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, September 2007. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13888-8.


Review by Glenn Hastedt, James Madison University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author's Response by Richard K. Betts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes


1 Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). For rebuttal see Richard K. Betts, "Surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy," International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (September 1989).
2 John R. Bolton, "Our Politicized Intelligence Services," Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2008, p. A17. See also Robert Jervis, "Making Intelligence Public," Saltzman Research Note (Columbia University, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, April 2008.
 
E. Bruce Reynolds. Thailand's Secret War: OSS, SOE and the Free Thai Underground During World War II. Cambridge Military Histories Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xx + 462 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-521-83601-2.


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was a very engaging read. I've already mentioned its value in casting light on previously unheralded parts of World War II. It is also a valuable history to help understand the present state of Thailand and Southeast Asia. Thailand is now under a civil government, but is still a strong partner of the United States. Thailand currently faces many issues, including violence in the heavily Muslim southern provinces, and the rise (or taking the long Asian view, the reappearance) of China as a regional power. Southeast Asia is not a singular entity and Thailand especially is a unique country that has remained independent based on its ability to navigate among the great powers. Thailand's Secret War is an excellent case study of such navigation during World War II. There is no reason to believe that Thailand will not follow a similar course when faced with future challenges.
 
Mark Moyar. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxvi + 512 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. ISBN 978-0-521-86911-9.

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


The Pitfalls of Historiography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

[2]. Victor Daniels and Judith C. Erdheim, "Game Warden," January 1976, CRC 284, Center for Naval Analysis, A-2-A-6.
 
Andrew Ward. River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. ix + 531 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-641-82923-9.

Reviewed by: Jennifer M. Murray, Department of History, Auburn University.


Military Significance or Postwar Symbolism?

In the aftermath of the Civil War and during the early twentieth century, Americans embraced reconciliation in an effort to reunite a war-torn nation. Eager to forget the harsh realties of the four-year conflict, Northerners and Southerners developed a sanitized interpretation of the events of 1861 to 1865. Union and Confederate veterans from around the nation gathered for reunions and reminiscences, drawing attention to their heroic deeds as soldiers. Consequently, the causes of secession and Civil War were quickly glossed over as men from both sides heralded their gallant efforts. This is not to say that animosity was absent in the post-Civil War society; not every battlefield saw aging veterans shaking hands over a stone wall, nor did the veterans remembered every engagement the same way. Such is the case with the April 12, 1864 "Massacre" of Fort Pillow.

There has been a plethora of works written on nearly every significant Civil War battle, but little scholarly attention has been devoted to the events at Fort Pillow. Andrew Ward's River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War fills this gap in the scholarship. Several significant works exist on the battle's key commanding figure, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, including John Allan Wyeth's That Devil Forrest: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1959) and William F. Currotto's Wizard of the Saddle (1996), yet few historians have examined the battle in its own right. Ward's analysis, therefore, is an excellent addition to the historiography.

Ward's narrative starts with a basic premise: Northerners, Southerners, blacks, and whites do not agree on what occurred at the fort. He suggests that the lack of consensus on the events that transpired stemmed from a desire to define the battle either as a "massacre" or as a hard-fought battle that resulted in a Confederate victory. Accordingly, this either/or dichotomy does not provide a complete or factual understanding of the events. Ward concedes that he initially balked at defining the events at Fort Pillow as a "massacre"; however, his overall tone and conclusion of the work suggests just that--Fort Pillow was a massacre.

River Run Red examines Fort Pillow not only within the context of the Civil War, but also within the larger context of antebellum society. For example, the narrative begins with an examination of society in Tennessee, including the state's initial reluctance to secede from the Union. In addition, Ward provides a comprehensive background of Nathan Bedford Forrest, highlighting Forrest's frontier upbringing, his volatile childhood, and his slave-trading endeavors. Ward explains Forrest's well-known temper as an inevitable consequence of "having to navigate as a free white in a slave society" and his willingness to "protect his own place in society by keeping slaves in theirs" (p. 24).

The heart of Ward's work is devoted to a traditional narration of the battle. Fort Pillow, named after General Gideon Pillow, was built by Confederate engineers in the early stages of the war. In the spring of 1863 Confederates abandoned the fort after a prolonged gunboat siege. The Union army, particularly General William T. Sherman, deemed the fort to be of little strategic value and subsequently ordered the fort to be abandoned. General Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, commanding Union forces in Memphis, ignored General Sherman's order to abandon the fort. Consequently, on February 8, 1864 Union forces of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, commanded by William Bradford, "a marginal amateur" warrior, occupied the fort for use as a garrison and recruiting post (p. 74). By the spring of 1864, Bradford's command included approximately 200 cavalrymen and about 300 black artillerists.

At dawn on the morning of April 12, 1864, Forrest and his men attacked the fort and demanded its surrender. Through a series of misunderstandings, Forrest believed that Bradford would not surrender. Flags of truce were then withdrawn and Forrest's men attacked the fort with a fury. The fighting against the black troops was particularly murderous and, according to Ward, continued after Forrest's cavalrymen spared the white soldiers. On the dispute over whether the fighting at Fort Pillow constituted a massacre, Ward concludes that based on the disproportionate number of Union and Confederate casualties, a massacre "certainly did" occur (p. 227). Ward, however, falls short of directly blaming Forrest for any premeditated slaughter. Ward concludes, "despite Northern accusations to the contrary, Forrest may have been more inclined to save blacks than whites" (p. 235). Furthermore, Forrest's background as a slave trader taught him to "value black captives," and he would have regarded the slaughter of the black troops as a "terrible waste of manpower" (p. 235).

The most interesting section of Ward's analysis is an examination of the competing memories of the massacre. For example, the author explains how Fort Pillow became a "special object of Dixie revisionism," because the massacre tarnished Southern efforts to romanticize their war effort and their soldiers (p. 370). In the aftermath of the Civil War, many Southerners claimed that if a massacre occurred, the fault lay not with Forrest, but with Bradford for refusing to surrender when given the opportunity.

River Run Red offers a fresh look at a controversial event; however, Ward's analysis has several weaknesses. For example, he attempts to balance a thematic approach with a traditional chronological framework, which results in a choppy, disconnected narrative that often leads to confusion. Moreover, Ward's incessant reference to Forrest as the "Wizard" is not only anachronistic, but also appears condescending. Contextually, Ward fails to make a convincing case for the overall importance of the tragic events at Fort Pillow. It appears as though the engagement had little significance to either army's military strategies and was more important symbolically, a point that Ward could have further reinforced. Nonetheless, Andrew Ward offers a comprehensive account of the massacre at Fort Pillow, and is an important contribution to the Civil War historiography.
 
Robert J. Schneller Jr. Cushing: Civil War SEAL. Brassey's Military Profiles Series. Series Editor Dennis E. Showalter. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2004. 119 pp. Index. , ISBN 978-1-57488-506-4.

Reviewed by: Douglas W. Cupples, Department of History, The University of Memphis.



Robert J. Schneller Jr., a historian at the U.S. Naval Historical Center, offers a well-written and concise military biography of one of the most important naval figures as well as one of the Civil War's most intriguing and charismatic leaders, William Baker Cushing (1842-74). Part of Brassey's Military Profiles series, this biography is a superb short book in a valuable series that does not attempt to accomplish too much. Schneller has written several other books on the United States Navy, including A Quest for Glory: A Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren (1996), for which he received the 1996 John Lyman Book Award in Biography from the North American Society for Oceanic History; and Farragut: America's First Admiral (2002), also part of Brassey's Military Profiles series.

Despite the important role played by both Confederate and Union navies, the navies are too often eclipsed by the Homeric scale of the land war. In fact, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894-1922) is less than one-fourth the size of the comparable The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880-1901) and less than one-half the size of the recently published supplement to the latter (Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies [1994]). None of the Civil War's naval engagements, for example, has garnered the attention of Gettysburg, and even the revolutionary clash between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia usually focuses on the transition from wood and sail to iron and steel rather than its effects on the overall campaigns. Yet, as Schneller indicates, Cushing, along with David Glasgow Farragut and David Dixon Porter, contributed as much to the final Union victory as did any other military figure.

Cushing did not have a seafaring background. Appointed to the United States Naval Academy from Wisconsin, he was the brother of Alonzo Cushing, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, who died a hero's death at the Battle of Gettysburg. Although the brothers shared many of the same qualities desired in a military leader, William was prone to an impetuosity that, at times, bordered on insubordination. He had a tendency to bully those with whom he disagreed, and he manifested a racist attitude toward blacks, which seemed extreme even for that era. He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy in 1857 but was forced to resign before graduating. With the outbreak of the war in April 1861, however, the navy's need for officers resulted in his appointment as acting master's mate on the USS Minnesota. Cushing found that life on a large ship of the line was too constraining as his overbearing personality often caused problems with his superiors. Nonetheless, his abilities had not gone without notice; he was promoted to lieutenant in July 1862. For the next two years, Cushing's flair for special operations was developed and honed to a fine perfection culminating with the destruction of the Albemarle and the elevation of his status as a legitimate U.S. naval hero. After getting past the chivalric duel between the CSS Alabama and the USS Kearsarge, perhaps the best-known naval event is the bold attack and sinking of the Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle by a small party of sailors led by Lieutenant Cushing on October 27, 1864. Cushing continued to serve with distinction for the remainder of the war and even led a ground assault of sailors and marines against Fort Fisher in 1865. After the war, he commanded the USS Wyoming to prevent Spanish authorities in Cuba from killing American sailors. In 1874, his health declined and he suffered a mental collapse, which soon was followed by his death in December of the same year.

Unfortunately, the subtitle of this biographical sketch is misleading. I would correct the tendency to conflate nineteenth-century terminology with that of the present day. Such terms as "Seal" "Green Beret," etc., are best reserved for the historical contexts in which they were developed and used. Although the intention is generally understood, the term is a contemporary one that denotes a specific branch of Navy Special Operations in the current service. This service division did not exist during the Civil War, and it is best to use terms that are historically accurate.

This minor issue of terminology should not detract from the value of this well-written and informative book. These types of biographical studies are useful contributions to the volume of works available to Civil War readers, whether amateur or professional historians. Adding greater depth than dictionary or encyclopedic entries, they provide insight and character development. Schneller has offered a concise and cogent biography of one of the war's most interesting warriors.
 
The Cost of Counterterrorism
Power, Politics, and Liberty
Laura K. Donohue
Stanford University, California


(ISBN-13: 9780521844444)



In the aftermath of a terrorist attack political stakes are high: legislators fear being seen as lenient or indifferent and often grant the executive broader authorities without thorough debate. The judiciary's role, too, is restricted: constitutional structure and cultural norms narrow the courts' ability to check the executive at all but the margins. The dominant 'Security or Freedom' framework for evaluating counterterrorist law thus fails to capture an important characteristic: increased executive power that shifts the balance between branches of government. This book re-calculates the cost of counterterrorist law to the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that the damage caused is significantly greater than first appears. Donohue warns that the proliferation of biological and nuclear materials, together with willingness on the part of extremists to sacrifice themselves, may drive each country to take increasingly drastic measures with a resultant shift in the basic structure of both states.

• Topical: an ambitious argument against the ‘Security or Freedom’ framework, which is the dominant paradigm for thinking about counterterrorist law • The first book to compare the history of both British and American counterterrorist law • Argues that counterterrorist law is a danger to the rights central to liberal democracy: life, liberty, property, privacy and free speech


Contents

1. The perilous dichotomy; 2. Indefinite detention and coercive interrogation; 3. Financial counterterrorism; 4. Privacy and surveillance; 5. Terrorist speech and free expression; 6. Auxiliary precautions.
Reviews

‘Laura Donohue’s sophisticated and complex analysis of counterterrorism law in the United Kingdom and United States warns of the risks to fundamental individual rights when democracies establish counterterrorist regimes. Although governments frame their initiatives in terms of a choice between security and freedom, Donohue challenges this logic. Loss of liberty is not necessarily balanced by gain in safety. Compromises intended to be temporary turn out to be permanent. Leaders and citizens of democracies would be well advised to heed this pointed and timely warning.’ Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University

'Laura Donohue's is a distinctive and authoritative voice in the field of counterterrorism law. Her account of the impact of such laws on civil liberties in Britain and the US is comprehensive and compelling, but it is also very disturbing to those who care about freedom.' Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights Law, London School of Economics

‘This masterly analysis of recent counter-terrorist legislation in the UK and USA should be required reading for governments and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic. It should also be read by all those who care about the price of security in terms of personal freedom and human rights.’ Rt Hon Lord Lloyd of Berwick

‘Within the context of the allied jurisdictions of the United Kingdom and the United States, this book offers a uniquely detailed thematic audit of the drastic reshaping of the law for the sake of security against terrorism. It is indisputably the finest comparative exposition and analysis of the primary laws against terrorism yet produced in either jurisdiction.’ Clive Walker, Professor of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds

‘A dazzlingly, comprehensive and penetrating diagnosis of how Western governments too often react to terrorism by promoting executive power in reckless disregard of the fundamental principles of liberty on which their legitimacy rests. Many authors decry this phenomenon, but this book is unique in its parallel treatment of the United States and British developments, its especially clear treatment of the daunting subject of ‘financial counterterrorism’, and in its deployment of both the grand narrative skill of a historian and the unyielding analytic rigor of a lawyer. In its elegant synthesis of materials ranging from treaties to judicial decisions to legislation to administrative protocols, this book is at once an impressive intellectual achievement and an alarming admonition.’ Robert Weisberg, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law and Director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Stanford University
 
Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. vii + 280 pp. Notes, index. , ISBN 0870710478.

Reviewed for H-War by Eric Swedin, Department of Information Systems and Technologies, Weber State University



Combining Environmental History and Military History

Many of us remember the environmental catastrophes of the Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi deliberately spilled oil into the Persian Gulf and then deliberately set Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, turning the sky dark with smoke. It is an obvious statement that war affects the environment and that the environment affects wars. Very few books have been written on this subject and this collection of essays is the first volume of its kind. The editors admit that it was hard to find enough essays for the book because this new multidisciplinary approach, crossing military history with environmental history, is not attracting enough attention. The essays range across the globe and time, from India and South Africa in colonial times to America during the Civil War. Four of the ten essays cover aspects of World War II, perhaps because of plentiful source material. Considering how hard it was to find material, it is surprising that none of the essays are weak, and that the wide range of topics and approaches lend strength to the work.

Warfare has always exploited the environment. One of the essays describes the massive Mughal imperial army in India moving across the landscape like a lawnmower, stripping the countryside of fodder and food, leaving behind waste. Armies laying siege to ancient and medieval cities recognized that the siege was a race between the time the stored supplies in the cities would last and how long the besieging armies could live off the countryside while remaining tied to the siege. Armies throughout history have often had their strategy driven by the need to find fresh areas to forage.

During the American Civil War, the Confederate forces had to forage and scavenge off the land and relied on the local ecology to survive, while the Union forces relied on their entire nation, using the extensive rail network and industrial base to live off of preserved meat, hardtack, and other supplies made in factories. The Confederates were still confined to an older military ecology, with all the limitations of logistics that implied; the Union forces were a modern army, relying on industrial supply networks and not beholden to the local ecology.

At times, generals have recognized that destroying the local environment is a useful way to bring the enemy to heel, with examples found in British tactics during the Boer War, the American decimation of the bison on the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, and the American use of herbicides during the Vietnam War. Sometimes environmental damage is inadvertent, such as when whales are mistaken for submarines by ships dropping depth charges.

We often think of war as only destroying the environment. For instance, during World War II when Japan was cut off from normal supplies of raw materials, they cut down their forests for fuel, logging 15 percent of their forests in just four years. They even stripped the leaves and undergrowth from the forests in order to make compost for their fields because the raw materials formerly used to make chemical fertilizers were now needed to make munitions. Japanese scientists tried to develop new alternative fuels from pine-root oil and other organic products, most of which failed. Edible refined soybean oil, however, fueled the battleship Yamato on its famous final voyage in April 1945. The Japanese people used mist-netting and bird-liming to catch so many migratory songbirds for food that postwar American occupation troops noticed the lack of singing birds. But the war was not completely an environmental catastrophe; fishing stocks rebounded from over fishing because Japanese trawlers and factory ships were unable to conduct their business during the war. Fishing stocks rebounded similarly in the North Atlantic. Water pollution was reduced in Finland during the war because pulp mills and other logging operations were interrupted.

World War I and World War II both required advances in insecticides, and the terminology of war was applied to the war against insects. In order to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, American forces successfully fought malaria with medicine and insecticides at the same time, a struggle where eight soldiers caught the disease for every one who fell before the human enemy. Americans also brought pests and diseases with them, such as ticks and cattle diseases, which are still there. Another long-term consequence of World War II was that before the war Japan supplied dried chrysanthemum blossoms to the United States for processing into insecticide. During the war, the Americans adopted dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) as an insecticide, and after the war the Japanese pyrethrum industry was unable to rebound, so DDT use continued. Military necessity has also created environmental havens. Demilitarized zones, such as that which divides North and South Korea, are places where animals and birds often thrive. Military bases around the world, while often sources of environmental problems because of toxic chemical dumps and other types of pollution, are also often refuges for endangered wildlife and provide room for ecological diversity to thrive.

Interdisciplinary research is how we build grander, more complete historical narratives, which should be the goal of all historians. I hope this book will spark similar research, because the fields of military history and environmental history need more articles like these. As one of the editors writes in his essay, “humans’ collective violence toward each other has had a profound parallel with humans’ violent disruptions of the natural world. Neither can be fully comprehended without the other” (p. 37).
 
Tony Shaw. Hollywood’s Cold War. Culture, Politics, and the Cold War Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 342 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index., ISBN 1-55849-611-4; , ISBN 1-55849-612-2.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Giles Scott-Smith, Roosevelt Study Center, Netherlands



The Mighty Projector?

Of all U.S. cultural products in the twentieth century, surely movies were the most exemplary (with the possible exception of food). They were also the most adept medium for propaganda purposes. Tony Shaw’s comprehensive survey of Hollywood’s role in the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1920s onward leaves few archives untouched and few movies unseen. Shaw chronicles how movies were central to the total conflict that was the Cold War and perfect for reifying a U.S. democratic identity while simultaneously undermining, ridiculing, or exposing the truth-claims of communism and its Soviet adherents. All forces in society needed to be mobilized for the cause, and the “state-film network,” from government officials and studio bosses down to production staff and the cast, were in their own particular ways part of this escapade.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of Hollywood’s commitment to the Cold War, Shaw presents a series of case studies from the 1930s to the 1980s through which he unpacks the many layers involved in cultural production and reception. He begins his deconstruction of the movie industry’s reactionary politics soon after 1917. Prior to the Russian Revolution, filmmakers did not shirk from dealing with social strife, however much the films generally still ended in capitalist bliss. But the Red Scare, combined with the solidification of the studio system and dominance by the big eight (MGM, Paramount, Warner, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) turned Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s into a fantasy factory determined to woo its mass audiences with the emotions of romance and the products of success. Big business (and its financiers on Wall Street) saw in movies the perfect vehicle (or opium) for distracting the public away from questioning the realities of quotidian inequalities. However, by analyzing Great Garbo’s movie Ninotchka, Shaw highlights well the change in mood and environment before and after World War II. Originally released by MGM in 1939, the movie lampooned rather than lambasted the Soviet experiment, while its re-release in 1947, deliberately timed to profit from the growing concerns over the Soviet threat, turned it into a more obvious political document, not least in Western Europe. By 1957, it had been remade into Silk Stockings, a musical that went several steps further than the original in emphasizing the exuberant vitality of the West and the accessibility of its uninhibited consumerism.

Hollywood may have produced some remarkable pro-Soviet movies during the mid-1940s to sell Moscow’s war effort to the American public, but it was also during that period that right-wing pressure groups began to gain influence, such as the Catholic National League of Decency and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. By the 1950s, the portrayal of Communists and communism was far more black-and-white than before the war, in line with Washington’s demonization of the main U.S. adversary. But Shaw, as in every dimension of this book, is judiciously careful not to draw any simplistic conclusions. His list of reasons for 1950s conservatism ranges from the financially opportunistic to the wish to protect studio reputations, but it is the need to avoid further mauling at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that strikes the sharpest cord. HUAC trailed its way through tinsel town in 1947, 1951-2, 1953, and 1955-8 as part of its consistent campaign to ensure an unswerving anticommunist line from the U.S. media and entertainment industry. No direct evidence of communist subversion was ever found, but HUAC demanded retribution anyway, and the studios complied with a blacklist of around two thousand people who were ejected from the Hollywood payroll and not readmitted before the 1960s. An aspect of this story that Shaw does not address is how far the accusation of communism was used as a weapon against those who were suspect because they were recent immigrants. If Hollywood needed to be all-American in outlook, were foreigners more likely to be tainted with subversive tendencies as a result?

Shaw explores the intricacies of Cold War film politics further through a series of studies on George Orwell, science fiction, race, John Wayne, the CIA, and, unexpectedly, Alex Cox, who represented a remarkable collision between freewheeling British indie filmmaking and the limitations of U.S. corporate conservatism in the 1980s. The details of the Pentagon’s involvement with Hollywood, which Shaw dismantles via The Green Berets (1968), are revealing enough. But the investigation of the film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954) and 1984 (1956) takes the analysis to a new level. Orwell, of course, is regarded as an icon of independent left thinking, although this reputation did take a hit with revelations of his list of undesirable leftists provided for the British government’s Information Research Department. [2] The intricate story of how these two novels were brought to the screen, by whom, and for what specific reasons, is a gem of a chapter. Were they successful in conveying the essential evils of totalitarianism to receptive audiences? They possibly were. Do these examples give us an insight into the ideological thinking of those involved, and the kind of conflict that they understood the Cold War to be? Yes, they absolutely do.

Two comments can be made on Shaw’s approach. Firstly, while he refers to the impact of major changes in the economics of film production, it is presented as no more than one influence among many on the line that movies took instead of being a decisive influence. Nevertheless, there is a sequence of events sketched through the book that clearly had a major influence: the rise of the studio system and the big eight in the 1920s, the decline of the studio system in the 1950s due partly to the rise of television, the need for renewal that brought a younger creative generation to the fore in the early 1970s, and the power of “big capital” in the 1980s. It would have been straightforward to have explained the developing outlook of Hollywood solely on these structural shifts. To Shaw’s credit, he avoids this line, instead appreciating at every opportunity the many layers involved when interpreting the production and reception of a movie. Secondly, Shaw neglects cinematic satire, and therefore does not examine the critical side of Hollywood. The early 1960s shrugged off the paranoia of the previous decade (only to encounter new ones, of course, but that is another story), allowing space for several movies that sought to undermine the standard interpretation of the East-West confrontation. They did this by turning it into an opportunity for sociopolitical comedy, either of the light (One, Two, Three [1961]) or dark variety (Dr. Strangelove [1964]), or as a means to highlight how both sides were equally corrupted (The Manchurian Candidate [1962]). Shaw mentions all three movies in the book, but only in passing, and he mentions satire only briefly in relation to the spate of swinging spy movies in the late sixties. More could perhaps have been made of these and other examples of how Hollywood sought to deflect the strictures of Cold War politics not by head-on criticism but by pastiche, ridicule, and unbounded eccentricity. Billy Wilder, in this respect, could have featured more here, having been on the production team of Ninotchka; refusing to testify to HUAC; suspected by the CIA’s man at Paramount, Luigi Luraschi, of being too pro-Soviet; and making a string of second-to-none movies (Sunset Boulevard [1950], Some Like It Hot [1959], The Apartment [1960]) before spoofing the superpower system in One, Two, Three. But Wilder was driven by the art of moviemaking, not by Cold War concerns, and he, therefore, does not fit so easily in this narrative.

Throughout the book, Shaw points out the workings of propaganda and lessons to be drawn from its application. The best propaganda, as one astute critic noted in 1955, is indirect, coming in under an audience’s radar. The Psychological Strategy Board’s approach in the same decade was that to be good propaganda, art itself had to be of a sufficient quality. And above all, propaganda works best by reinforcing existing beliefs and sentiments instead of trying to convert. So where does the book leave us in terms of understanding Hollywood’s Cold War? Overall, one has the strong impression that it was big business using the conflict to make money as much as government using big business to wage the conflict. But that is precisely the point. The Cold War’s agendas, caricatures, and lines of demarcation did seep into every aspect of social life, and it would be strange if the movies did not reflect this. Both government and business were in a “harmonious relationship” based “at root on the need to protect capitalism” (p. 304). The problem for historical analysis such as this, of course, is that everything can easily slip into one-dimensionality—if the Cold War was everywhere, it was, in the end, nowhere. On the whole, Shaw avoids this trap; the quality of his research confirms that Hollywood did not simply project a state-scripted ideology but displayed “a range of different ideologies,” generally interlocking, sometimes merging, and occasionally clashing (p. 303). For this reason, the “state-film network” to which he refers is after all best illustrated through the case studies he provides, it being an uneven and constantly shifting marriage of convenience (or conviction, depending on who was involved). Hollywood was no more an agenda-setter than it was a gatekeeper for a Cold War consensus based on U.S. leadership, the vitality of free society, and the fear of failure.

In short, this is a complex and rewarding book, held together with a coherent argument but not afraid to admit the many-sided possibilities when interpreting cultural products. Occasionally, Shaw does overstep the line, such that the infamous The Blob from 1958 becomes “an objective correlative for the right-wing fear of ‘creeping communism’” (p. 138). But we can forgive him this, not only because this is a fine, well-researched work, but mainly because in dealing with Hollywood, of all subjects, one should be allowed the occasional lapse into excess.



Note

[1]. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1992), 483-484; Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 468; and Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London: Penguin, 2004), 111-121.
 
Tony Shaw. Hollywood’s Cold War. Culture, Politics, and the Cold War Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 342 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index., ISBN 1-55849-611-4; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 1-55849-612-2.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Giles Scott-Smith, Roosevelt Study Center, Netherlands



The Mighty Projector?

Of all U.S. cultural products in the twentieth century, surely movies were the most exemplary (with the possible exception of food). They were also the most adept medium for propaganda purposes. Tony Shaw’s comprehensive survey of Hollywood’s role in the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1920s onward leaves few archives untouched and few movies unseen. Shaw chronicles how movies were central to the total conflict that was the Cold War and perfect for reifying a U.S. democratic identity while simultaneously undermining, ridiculing, or exposing the truth-claims of communism and its Soviet adherents. All forces in society needed to be mobilized for the cause, and the “state-film network,” from government officials and studio bosses down to production staff and the cast, were in their own particular ways part of this escapade.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of Hollywood’s commitment to the Cold War, Shaw presents a series of case studies from the 1930s to the 1980s through which he unpacks the many layers involved in cultural production and reception. He begins his deconstruction of the movie industry’s reactionary politics soon after 1917. Prior to the Russian Revolution, filmmakers did not shirk from dealing with social strife, however much the films generally still ended in capitalist bliss. But the Red Scare, combined with the solidification of the studio system and dominance by the big eight (MGM, Paramount, Warner, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) turned Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s into a fantasy factory determined to woo its mass audiences with the emotions of romance and the products of success. Big business (and its financiers on Wall Street) saw in movies the perfect vehicle (or opium) for distracting the public away from questioning the realities of quotidian inequalities. However, by analyzing Great Garbo’s movie Ninotchka, Shaw highlights well the change in mood and environment before and after World War II. Originally released by MGM in 1939, the movie lampooned rather than lambasted the Soviet experiment, while its re-release in 1947, deliberately timed to profit from the growing concerns over the Soviet threat, turned it into a more obvious political document, not least in Western Europe. By 1957, it had been remade into Silk Stockings, a musical that went several steps further than the original in emphasizing the exuberant vitality of the West and the accessibility of its uninhibited consumerism.

Hollywood may have produced some remarkable pro-Soviet movies during the mid-1940s to sell Moscow’s war effort to the American public, but it was also during that period that right-wing pressure groups began to gain influence, such as the Catholic National League of Decency and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. By the 1950s, the portrayal of Communists and communism was far more black-and-white than before the war, in line with Washington’s demonization of the main U.S. adversary. But Shaw, as in every dimension of this book, is judiciously careful not to draw any simplistic conclusions. His list of reasons for 1950s conservatism ranges from the financially opportunistic to the wish to protect studio reputations, but it is the need to avoid further mauling at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that strikes the sharpest cord. HUAC trailed its way through tinsel town in 1947, 1951-2, 1953, and 1955-8 as part of its consistent campaign to ensure an unswerving anticommunist line from the U.S. media and entertainment industry. No direct evidence of communist subversion was ever found, but HUAC demanded retribution anyway, and the studios complied with a blacklist of around two thousand people who were ejected from the Hollywood payroll and not readmitted before the 1960s. An aspect of this story that Shaw does not address is how far the accusation of communism was used as a weapon against those who were suspect because they were recent immigrants. If Hollywood needed to be all-American in outlook, were foreigners more likely to be tainted with subversive tendencies as a result?

Shaw explores the intricacies of Cold War film politics further through a series of studies on George Orwell, science fiction, race, John Wayne, the CIA, and, unexpectedly, Alex Cox, who represented a remarkable collision between freewheeling British indie filmmaking and the limitations of U.S. corporate conservatism in the 1980s. The details of the Pentagon’s involvement with Hollywood, which Shaw dismantles via The Green Berets (1968), are revealing enough. But the investigation of the film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954) and 1984 (1956) takes the analysis to a new level. Orwell, of course, is regarded as an icon of independent left thinking, although this reputation did take a hit with revelations of his list of undesirable leftists provided for the British government’s Information Research Department. [2] The intricate story of how these two novels were brought to the screen, by whom, and for what specific reasons, is a gem of a chapter. Were they successful in conveying the essential evils of totalitarianism to receptive audiences? They possibly were. Do these examples give us an insight into the ideological thinking of those involved, and the kind of conflict that they understood the Cold War to be? Yes, they absolutely do.

Two comments can be made on Shaw’s approach. Firstly, while he refers to the impact of major changes in the economics of film production, it is presented as no more than one influence among many on the line that movies took instead of being a decisive influence. Nevertheless, there is a sequence of events sketched through the book that clearly had a major influence: the rise of the studio system and the big eight in the 1920s, the decline of the studio system in the 1950s due partly to the rise of television, the need for renewal that brought a younger creative generation to the fore in the early 1970s, and the power of “big capital” in the 1980s. It would have been straightforward to have explained the developing outlook of Hollywood solely on these structural shifts. To Shaw’s credit, he avoids this line, instead appreciating at every opportunity the many layers involved when interpreting the production and reception of a movie. Secondly, Shaw neglects cinematic satire, and therefore does not examine the critical side of Hollywood. The early 1960s shrugged off the paranoia of the previous decade (only to encounter new ones, of course, but that is another story), allowing space for several movies that sought to undermine the standard interpretation of the East-West confrontation. They did this by turning it into an opportunity for sociopolitical comedy, either of the light (One, Two, Three [1961]) or dark variety (Dr. Strangelove [1964]), or as a means to highlight how both sides were equally corrupted (The Manchurian Candidate [1962]). Shaw mentions all three movies in the book, but only in passing, and he mentions satire only briefly in relation to the spate of swinging spy movies in the late sixties. More could perhaps have been made of these and other examples of how Hollywood sought to deflect the strictures of Cold War politics not by head-on criticism but by pastiche, ridicule, and unbounded eccentricity. Billy Wilder, in this respect, could have featured more here, having been on the production team of Ninotchka; refusing to testify to HUAC; suspected by the CIA’s man at Paramount, Luigi Luraschi, of being too pro-Soviet; and making a string of second-to-none movies (Sunset Boulevard [1950], Some Like It Hot [1959], The Apartment [1960]) before spoofing the superpower system in One, Two, Three. But Wilder was driven by the art of moviemaking, not by Cold War concerns, and he, therefore, does not fit so easily in this narrative.

Throughout the book, Shaw points out the workings of propaganda and lessons to be drawn from its application. The best propaganda, as one astute critic noted in 1955, is indirect, coming in under an audience’s radar. The Psychological Strategy Board’s approach in the same decade was that to be good propaganda, art itself had to be of a sufficient quality. And above all, propaganda works best by reinforcing existing beliefs and sentiments instead of trying to convert. So where does the book leave us in terms of understanding Hollywood’s Cold War? Overall, one has the strong impression that it was big business using the conflict to make money as much as government using big business to wage the conflict. But that is precisely the point. The Cold War’s agendas, caricatures, and lines of demarcation did seep into every aspect of social life, and it would be strange if the movies did not reflect this. Both government and business were in a “harmonious relationship” based “at root on the need to protect capitalism” (p. 304). The problem for historical analysis such as this, of course, is that everything can easily slip into one-dimensionality—if the Cold War was everywhere, it was, in the end, nowhere. On the whole, Shaw avoids this trap; the quality of his research confirms that Hollywood did not simply project a state-scripted ideology but displayed “a range of different ideologies,” generally interlocking, sometimes merging, and occasionally clashing (p. 303). For this reason, the “state-film network” to which he refers is after all best illustrated through the case studies he provides, it being an uneven and constantly shifting marriage of convenience (or conviction, depending on who was involved). Hollywood was no more an agenda-setter than it was a gatekeeper for a Cold War consensus based on U.S. leadership, the vitality of free society, and the fear of failure.

In short, this is a complex and rewarding book, held together with a coherent argument but not afraid to admit the many-sided possibilities when interpreting cultural products. Occasionally, Shaw does overstep the line, such that the infamous The Blob from 1958 becomes “an objective correlative for the right-wing fear of ‘creeping communism’” (p. 138). But we can forgive him this, not only because this is a fine, well-researched work, but mainly because in dealing with Hollywood, of all subjects, one should be allowed the occasional lapse into excess.



Note

[1]. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1992), 483-484; Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 468; and Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London: Penguin, 2004), 111-121.
 
nthony Clayton. The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. xiv + 335 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index., ISBN 978-1-4058-5901-1.

Reviewed by: Keith Surridge, Independent Scholar.


The British Army is now constantly in the news owing to its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has generated much interest in the troops themselves and recently the army has been the subject of several television documentaries. One that will air soon features a former soap opera actor embedded with a particular unit. The involvement of Princes William and Harry in the army, both of whom have successfully trained as junior officers, keeps its media profile high. Moreover, retired senior officers have been publishing their memoirs; the most recent, and perhaps outspoken, is that by General Sir Mike Jackson, Soldier: the Autobiography (2007). His trenchant views on operations in Kosovo, and especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, caused much comment in the press. Thus, a book that seeks to explore the British army officer from earliest times to the modern era is timely.

With recent events in mind, Anthony Clayton, a former lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in line with a lot of press opinion, points out that most politicians have no experience of army life. And, consequently, they have no understanding of the stresses and strains placed upon officers who have to meld individuals into fighting units and command them in combat situations. His book, therefore, seeks to give some idea of how officers have coped over the centuries with leading men in peace and war. Examining the role of the officer from the modern army's foundation in 1660 to the twenty-first century, Clayton discusses the social background of officers; their training and motivation; and how they have interacted with their men. Influencing all these is the peculiar nature of the British regiment, a "mutual obligation society" (p. 7), with its ancient traditions, that has no counterpart elsewhere.

Clayton explains that for much of the period, the army officer was recruited from the aristocracy and gentry. They were politically reliable, not very well-educated, and not interested much in their profession. War, like politics, was a vocation: officers were expected to sacrifice their wealth in a form of "noblesse oblige." Although many considered it their duty and privilege to lead, commanding regiments was an expensive business. The most expensive outlay for an officer was his commission, his appointment by the crown to a particular rank. For those with money promotion could be easily purchased; for those without ready cash, the officer could expect to sell his commission for a substantial profit at the end of his career. In effect, this was a sanctioned form of pension provision. Officers treated their commissions as property, which fitted neatly into the ethos that society should be based on property and property-holders should govern the country. However, with senior officers also responsible for feeding and clothing their men, corruption abounded. The state provided few financial incentives, so officers often turned to crime to earn their perquisites. In peacetime, many officers were simply crooks and took little interest in their men or their profession. Yet, in times of war, they led their men from the front, and led by example. This indeed was the paradox of the army officer: often a crooked nincompoop in peace, but a fire-breathing warrior in war.

During the nineteenth century, the army officer became more professional and various abuses were removed. Officer-cadet training was implemented with the foundation of what later became known as the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The purchase of commissions for children was outlawed, and later, in 1871, the buying of commissions was abolished altogether. Thereafter, promotion was by seniority tempered with merit, although the large number of imperial conflicts ensured that opportunities for advancement were readily available. Moreover, the officer was expected to take better care of his men, while still exercising an effortless sense of social superiority. This change in attitude took a while to catch on, but by the end of the century some officers were promoting temperance, moral reformation, and the provision of libraries. Clayton argues that these efforts helped to improve the public perception of the army, which is true enough. But I would suggest that this only went so far: Rudyard Kipling, for example, still needed to write his poem Tommy (1890) to show that the public continued to hold negative views of the troops.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, the officer corps expanded and many men came from social backgrounds hitherto considered unsuitable. Nevertheless, officers were still expected to lead by example and consequently suffered the highest proportion of casualties within the army. The dangers of front-line duty were so bad that the life expectancy of a newly arrived junior officer was one month.

Afterwards, the army reverted to its traditional role of imperial policeman, which provided excellent training for officers. Indeed, standards were very high, even though the officer reverted to type in that he was recruited from the usual classes, and remained "cheerful, carefree and inclined to arrogance" (p. 195). Such attitudes, however, were found wanting following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The disastrous campaign in France in 1940 revealed that officers were unprepared for a modern, European conflict. The whole recruiting system was shaken up and by the end of the war the selection of officers had improved immensely, although there were acute shortages.

Being well-educated had never been a priority in the recruitment of officers, and, surprisingly perhaps, this view continued after 1945. Up to the 1960s, the main criterion was the ability to "fit in," and so social class retained its importance in selection procedures. This all began to change once it became easier for young people to go to university during the 1960s. Many officers now have university degrees and the army has adjusted more to the vagaries of modern society, perhaps better than at any other time. There are now women officers, divorced officers are tolerated, and same-sex relationships are accepted. Many officers no longer come from the traditional classes, although there is still a shortage of officers from non-white backgrounds. It would have been good, however, if we could have been told the percentage of officers from the public schools. My suspicion is that they are still overrepresented. It seems that in a short period of time the army has undergone acute social changes as it reassesses its commitments in the modern world. Because of this, Clayton worries how the army might be perceived by public opinion. At the moment, it would seem his fears are unfounded because the army has rarely been held higher in public esteem. It is perceived as having to clear up the mess left by politicians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clayton has reviewed the life and careers of army officers over the centuries in an accessible manner and will help our understanding of the modern service. His overall view of the relationship between officers and men since 1660 is positive. The behavior of officers was often problematic for the men and the service, but in general they have always managed to maintain the loyalty, and sometimes affection, of the men they have commanded. His conclusion is particularly valuable in summing up the personal and professional considerations of the contemporary officer. However, the scope of the work means, as Clayton explains in the foreword, that it has its limitations. In my view this has meant the book falls somewhere between a social history of the officer corps and a military history. I was disappointed, therefore, not to find a substantial guide to further reading. There is no mention, for example, of important books by Edward Spiers (The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1902 [1992]) or David French (Raising Churchill's Army. The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945 [2000]). This criticism aside, Clayton's book is a useful starting point for any student of the British army and its leaders.
 
Jon Lee Anderson. The Fall of Baghdad. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. viii + 375 pp. Maps, index. , ISBN 978-0-14-303585-5.
Reviewed by: Wm. Shane Story, U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Published by: H-War (May, 2006)


An Iraqi Tragedy

Like a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare, Jon Anderson has raced after America's war on terror without catching his prey. Nevertheless, the race has made a good story. A veteran foreign correspondent, Anderson returned to old haunts in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11 to report on the fall of the Taliban. A year later, Anderson published The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan(2002), but the world's attention suddenly shifted to Iraq and Anderson continued the chase. The Fall of Baghdad is Anderson's travelogue of the next twenty-one months, from Saddam's referendum and prisoner amnesty in October 2002 to Ambassador Paul Bremer's self-congratulatory departure from Baghdad in June 2004. Anderson's writing emphasizes details, colors, and the ambience of the places he visits and the facial expressions of the people he meets and cultivates as sources. For background material, Anderson jumbles years and events--1958, 1920, 1979, an assassination, a coup--suggesting hidden meanings in such anachronisms. Anderson sees contradictions everywhere, and he dresses them up as riddles. Offering intrigue at the expense of analysis or answers, Anderson's riddles bear only a patina of wisdom.

Developing portraits of a few Iraqis to give his story depth, Anderson emphasizes the experiences of Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam Hussein's doctor, favorite artist, and confidant. Bashir saw Hussein as a ruthless survivor, and his system of survival depended on tyranny. Tyranny, Bashir thought, was a virtual prerequisite for governing Iraq, so even its mass killings--or killings of the masses were not beyond the pale, because they were necessary to sustain the state. On the other hand, Bashir damned the regime he served for its unmitigated corruption, for "dictatorship, for murder, for torture and bloodshed" (p. 70). The system culminated in Saddam's despotic son Uday, a psychopath, serial rapist, thief, and murderer who transformed tyranny into recreation and "humiliated many Iraqis, many officials" (p. 292). Bashir believed such corruption sealed the regime's fate; someone had to overthrow Saddam.

Bashir admired western democracies and thought that life was worthless in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and communist China, and yet "no place was crueler than Iraq" (p. 71). Although Bashir prospered because Saddam survived, he held America responsible for Iraq's fate. Just as the United States kept Castro in power in Cuba, Bashir thought, the United States kept Saddam in power for its own purposes. Most Iraqis must have shared Bashir's impression of America's virtual omnipotence, because when the Americans came, resistance seemed pointless and the regime collapsed. Bashir claimed vindication; "I was expecting this" (p. 291).

The regime's swift collapse hardly seemed predictable in the midst of the invasion. The bombing campaign, which General Franks had billed as "shock and awe," was impressive in its scale and precision, but it failed to topple the regime. Once American forces reached Baghdad, however, panic set in and civilians fled. When Iraqi soldiers declined to fight, the government fell and disorder spread. Initial encounters between American forces and Iraqis tended toward friendly amusement in an atmosphere of liberation. Disorder grew, however, as looting escalated into mob frenzies. With the situation out of control, American forces began stopping traffic, erecting barriers, implementing curfews and detaining hundreds of suspects. Anderson left Iraq in late April 2003, when the Americans seemed to be re-establishing authority and laying the groundwork for a transitional Iraqi government.

Weeks of instability, however, kept Iraq in the headlines, and Anderson returned to Baghdad in the latter half of June 2003. An American official warned Anderson that Iraq was a mess and very dangerous, especially around the western towns of Ar Ramadi and Al Fallujah. The American enterprise, the official thought, gave every sign of failing. In Baghdad, Anderson found Bashir full of complaints about the Americans. Americans gave the impression of listening and caring about Iraqis' welfare, Bashir said, but they did not deliver on their promises. Moreover, tribal chiefs complained that the Americans dissembled about their intentions and had failed "to put things right"(p. 319). Anderson's visit to an American unit in Fallujah confirmed his worst fears about the American forces' inability to comprehend or deal with Iraqis. The troops were lost, and the chain of command was in denial. An American battalion commander, whom Anderson described as enthusiastic, stated, "Fallujah is a success story" (p. 328). Anderson's tour of Fallujah with an armored patrol indicated otherwise. At one point, Anderson witnessed an unwinnable testosterone-driven clash between a Fallujah shopkeeper and an American soldier, a "psy ops officer, a beefy man in his thirties" (p. 331). The American, who presumably thought his pierced tongue was an expression of stylish independence, found it brought only insults and ridicule from the Iraqis. Fear and respect were long gone, and laughing young Fallujans toyed with the Americans as a prelude to attacking them.

Month by month the situation deteriorated. Iraqis demanded solutions and respect from the Americans, but denounced and assassinated other Iraqis for working with occupiers. American actions seemed clumsy and inept, whether it was cracking down or backing off, all of it culminating in the stillborn Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first pictures of Abu Ghraib torture surfaced, followed by jihadists sawing off Nicholas Berg's head. Finally, Paul Bremer turned sovereignty back over to the Iraqis on June 28, 2004 and returned to Washington, satisfied that he had left Iraq better than he found it.

Anderson's style imposed its own limitations on his work. Long before the invasion, Anderson cultivated relationships with Iraqis approved by the regime--his driver, his "minder" from the Ministry of Information, and ranking regime insiders like Saddam's doctor--to provide personalities and depth for his stories. Anderson tracked these same individuals' lives after Saddam's fall. Anderson's regime-connected contacts accepted Saddam's demise as necessary, but they were stunned to see their own fortunes melt away as well. Theirs is the tragic story that Anderson relates, and not that of the Kurds or Shiites whose torture was Saddam and whose freedom was anything but Saddam.

As Anderson closed his work in 2004, he saw great risks in Iraq, both of a nationwide jihad against the Americans and of an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war. The Fall of Baghdad illuminates some of the prejudices and conflicts that energized the strife. Those insights make Anderson's work a worthwhile read, with the caveat that readers should not expect a developed or documented consideration of the failed defense of Baghdad or any comprehension of American military operations. Since Anderson offers no analysis, the wait continues for a capable study of the American war and the Iraqi crisis.
 
The Russian General Staff. The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Translated and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress. Modern War Studies Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xxvi + 364 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, glossary, index., ISBN 978-0-7006-1185-0; , ISBN 978-0-7006-1186-7.

Reviewed by: Jonathan M. House, Department of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

Published by: H-War (March, 2006)

The Bear and the Mujahideen

Since Karl Marx considered history to be a science, the professional soldiers of the Soviet Union always placed a high priority on detailed historical analysis of military operations. Throughout World War II, the Soviets collected, analyzed, and disseminated detailed lessons after each campaign and major battle. Yet, because the Soviet Union saw itself as the champion of wars of national liberation throughout the world, the one type of military operation that few Soviet officers ever contemplated was one in which the Soviet Army would be called upon to suppress a popular insurgency. This ideological blindness goes far to explain not only the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, but also the unusual nature of the official history that the General Staff belatedly published about that conflict.

This Russian General Staff study is available in English thanks to a superb translation and editing effort. Lester Grau, a longtime analyst of the Soviet military, has already produced two seminal studies of the Afghan war in his own right, and Michael Gress is a veteran of the Soviet motorized rifle forces. Both historians and soldiers owe these men a considerable debt for producing this work, which in 2005 was re-issued in paperback to reach the wider audience it deserves.

Many of the conclusions in this study will be familiar to students of counterinsurgency in general and Afghanistan in particular. In the introduction, for example, the Russian authors bluntly state that the principal failure of the Soviet intervention was political, in the sense that the Soviet-backed Karmal regime never gained the support of the multi-ethnic Afghan population (p. 23). More practical military observations also abound throughout the book. Neither the Soviet Army nor its Afghan counterpart was adequately trained to fight the rebels, and many Soviet units remained road-bound, tied to their armored vehicles rather than pursuing the enemy into the mountains. The extreme altitudes of Afghanistan sharply diminished the lift capacity of helicopters, while ground supply convoys placed equal strains on the Soviet truck fleet. The Soviets tried and failed to make the Afghan Army bear the brunt of the military effort. When they did take the offensive, the Soviets attempted to identify and destroy the rebel command structure, not understanding that the mujahideen had little organization beyond tribal loyalties. Finally, the Soviet reluctance to fight at night meant that their operations had little effect on rebel mobility and logistics.

Yet other aspects of the book are less well known. According to the Russian authors, the 40th Soviet Army, the principal occupation force in Afghanistan, suffered moe than 26,000 dead during the ten years (1979-1989) of the conflict (p. 43). This contrasts markedly with official figures of 11,321 dead for all Soviet armed forces.[1] Most of the 329 helicopters lost in Afghanistan were victims not just of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, but even more of poor crew training and overuse of the aircraft and pilots (p. 221). In addition, the editors have added numerous facts supporting the significant but unacknowledged Soviet involvement in Afghanistan before their 1979 intervention (pp. xxiii, 209.)

In short, this is a superb study on a topic of considerable current interest. Some of the problems identified in logistics, training, and operations may be too detailed to interest the general reader or historian, but students of military operations and of the current struggles in the Middle East will find such details fascinating. The skillful translation and editorial comments of this version alleviate the traditionally ponderous style of Russian military writing, and the result is eminently readable. Overall, The Soviet-Afghan War deserves the widest dissemination among soldiers, historians, and the general public.

Note

[1]. See, for example, G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill Books and Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 287.
 

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