Category Archive

We often hear about the Brits boffo counterinsurgency in Malaysia. But are the British still in Malaysia? Yes, it was a communist insurgency, which they defeated. But they also left, which presumably sapped the nationalist dimension from equation. ~Josh Marshall

As others have pointed out before, the Malayan case is much less encouraging for us, since the communist insurgents came primarily from the Chinese minority and so did not have nearly as much of a popular “sea” in which to swim.  It was more like a small pond.  The Muslim Malay majority was not sympathetic to their goals, and Malay nationalists supported the British effort in exchange for a promise of independence, which made the insurgents’ political marginalisation and defeat much, much easier.  Decolonisation and independence were already in the works, while communist revolution seemed both unnecessary and undesirable to the majority. 

Both Malaya and Vietnamese insurgencies grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation, but the chief difference was that the Vietminh could appeal to national identity in ways that the communist insurgents in Malaya could not.  In other words, the Malayan insurgency lost in part because it could not count on a nationalist dimension in its fight, since the insurgents were not representing a nationalist cause, but rather an ideological one and one associated with a small minority group.  (Comparing the Malayan and Vietnamese cases seems to confirm Prof. Lukacs’ view that nationalism is the far more powerful and therefore potentially more dangerous modern ideology when compared to socialism and communism.)  Had the British opted to stay in Malaya indefinitely, as the French chose to try to do in Indochina, there might have been a broader-based anti-colonial rebellion, which would have probably been very different in its outcome. 

The Malayan case was also significantly different in the number of insurgents involved:

In the end the conflict involved up to a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas.

Estimates of the insurgency’s size in Iraq vary, but I have seen figures this year as high as 60,000.  (As I understand this estimate, this refers only to Sunni insurgents.)  That’s seven to eight times the number of insurgents, while we have approximately four times as many soldiers fighting them.  If the optimal size of a counterinsurgency force is 10x larger than that of the insurgents, the British were much closer to the ideal and had the overwhelming support of the majority, and it still took them nine years before the crisis was formally ended.  The lesson from the Malayan experience is that you should fight very unpopular, isolated, highly ideological insurgencies and you should ally with the local nationalists if you want to win.  It is very difficult for a government, especially one backed by a foreign power, to compete with nationalist insurgents in the intensity and credibility of their nationalism. 

Until Iraq, I really thought I understood what a “civil war” was. Or, more accurately, I understood that a great variety of intrastate conflagrations could be rightfully termed “civil war”. The American Civil War was a civil war. In a different sense, Bosnia and Rwanda were civil wars marked by hideous power imbalances. ~Brian Beutler

Part of the confusion about whether we should call the Iraqi civil war a civil war or not (I think we should, since at bottom that’s what it is) stems from just this sort of broad, lazy definition of civil war.  This isn’t really Mr. Beutler’s fault–a lot of people don’t define it properly, and almost everyone thinks that our “Civil War” was a civil war.  After all, that’s what they were taught in school, and that’s what most scholars call it.  Iraq war supporters have taken advantage of this confusion and used it to argue, more  or less, that the lack of an organised Army of Northern Anbar marching in columns with drummer boys and flags proves that Iraq is not in the grips of civil war, as if Iraqi Sunni insurgents were interested in anything other than retaking power in Baghdad.  It is the foreigners (and some of the Kurds) who want to split up Iraq–most of the Iraqis may not “think” of themselves principally as Iraqis, as Lugar said, but that does not mean that they do not want their own group to control all of Iraq, or as much of it as they can manage.  A lack of shared identity or a lack of a shared interpretation of national identity is usually a prerequisite to civil war; it does not necessarily entail partition or separation. 

Sometimes, for the sake of brevity and communication, I still use the phrase Civil War to refer to the War of Secession, but this is not an accurate name.  I use the translation of the French name (guerre de la Secession) because the French, God bless them, do not have the hang-ups of Unionist historiography compelling them to use language that legitimises the mythical of the eternal Union.  The only way that a war between states that had left the Union and those that remained in the United States could be classified as a civil war is if the seceding states sought to conquer and subjugate the other states (which would make secession seem a strange move) or if “the Union” was not actually a union but a consolidated state inside of which a war was raging between citizens of that same state.  Neither of these was the case, so I submit that “the Civil War” was not any such thing.  It was a war of secession in which the anti-secessionist forces won.  A similar point might be made about the wars in what was Yugoslavia: they were wars of secession from different polities.  Strangely enough, we do not call colonial wars for independence “civil wars”–our War for Independence is not called “the British civil war” on either side of the Atlantic, and the Dutch rebellion against Spain is not called the “Habsburg civil war” (and it would be ridiculous if it were).  From a certain French perspective, the war in Algeria was a kind of French civil war, inasmuch as the French regarded Algeria as an integral part of France by that time, but it wasn’t really a civil war, either.  Many people in the press referred to the North Yemeni invasion of the newly-constituted Democratic Republic of Yemen (a successor to the Marxist South Yemen) as civil war, but it was the suppression of separatism pure and simple.

As I have said before, and as I will probably say again before it’s all over, a civil war is, as the name implied, a war fought between citizens of the same polity.  The Roman civil wars are a good standard to which can compare other wars to test whether they are being fought between fellow citizens or not; the English, Spanish and Russian civil wars were likewise genuine civil wars.  Citizens of seceding states who want to create a new confederation of states might reasonably be defined, from the perspective of the union from which they seceded, as rebels of a sort, but they are not  fellow citizens with the people they are fighting.  Also, they are not interested in seizing control of the government of the union from which they have separated.  Both of those conditions would probably be necessary for such a war to be correctly labeled a civil war.

Since smart people I respect seem to think so much of this VDH column, it seems necessary to point out some of the more fantastically crazy things Hanson says in that column:

Few believed that it was a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany; fought heroically by amateur French, British, and American soldiers who defeated the professionalism and skill of the German army (the most lethal land force that had yet appeared); and was a result of two different and largely antithetical visions of Europe. No one dared accept that the post-bellum failure to invade Germany, occupy Berlin, and demonstrate the utter lunacy of German militarism had caused World War II; the problem was that the victorious allies had been too mean rather than too fickle.

Yes, few believe these things, because these things are not true.  WWI wasn’t principally a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany.  It was the result of combined Austrian meddling, Russian folly, British hesitation and German diffidence.  The problem with Berlin in the July crisis was its passivity in guiding its allies’ policies, not in its aggressiveness.  German “aggressiveness” in the Schlieffen Plan was an unavoidable result of being encircled by the Franco-Russian alliance.  Blame that on stupid Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and the decision to drop the connection with Russia, which you certainly can do, but spare us the lectures about German aggression.  The two antithetical visions of Europe to which Hanson refers were the vision in which the Entente powers continued to dominate most of the world and the vision in which Germany would be permitted to join them as a first-rank power.  Scary!  It never ceases to amaze me how people can look at the vastly stronger, more powerful alliance in the Entente and see in it some poor victim of overmighty Germany and the allies that it had to carry for the duration. 

Hanson’s “On to Berlin!” idea is stunning.  To believe that this was even possible, much less desirable, by the time the Ludendorff offensive failed is to be quite wrong.  It was possible to occupy Paris because Napoleon had been beaten in the field, but the treatment of the defeated party ensured that it was incorporated into the system of European powers and not treated with the harshness that its aggression might have seemed to merit.  Not only does Hanson find the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany lacking as a punishment, but he seems to think that humiliating and grinding the Germans under the boot even more would have stamped out German nationalism.  This is shockingly wrong.  What was the German response to the Napoleonic invasions and occupations?  It was in part the creation and cultivation of German nationalism.  Does anyone think, supposing it was actually possible to do (and the American public would never have tolerated prolonging the war to capture Berlin), that occupying Germany in the 1920s would have created a less bitter, less resentful, less nationalistic, less revanchist Germany?  Does anyone think that a liberal democratic constitution imposed by the Allied sword directly would have been more acceptable to German nationalists than the one adopted by Germans after the Armistice?  This would only have delayed the resumption of hostilities, but it would have ensured that the revenge meted out by the Germans on those who had occupied their country would have been even more severe.  This is a perfect example of the problem with Hanson’s whole view: whatever the problem, it could have been solved by the application of even more force.     

As I have already mentioned, Poulos’ post is outstanding.  In addition to pointing out the virtues and significance of deliberative rhetoric and its function in channeling political and legal conflict into peaceful forms of disputation, James cuts right to, and through, the heart of one of the more dreadful rhetorical tropes of certain conservative pundits of an empire-friendly bent: the frequent pairing of the “Unionist” assault on the Confederacy with the war against the Axis, in particular the fight against Nazi Germany, as if they were comparable in any meaningful way.  The only real point of comparison is that both wars were waged by the United States government and both resulted in victories for that government–after that, they are not all that similar.  I will return to the first point later, but let me say something about this pairing first. 

There are some obvious problems with this from the start.  The “Unionist” war against the South was fought in contravention of the Constitution (though, quite naturally, it was fought “in the name of” the Constitution, as so many usurpations ever after have been justified) and represented the concentrated effort by an assembly of polities to invade and conquer another.  WWII, whatever one wants to argue about the policies leading up to it and the negative effects that it had on the country (and there were more than a few), was nonetheless a constitutional, declared war fought as a response to an attack on American territory.  The opponents fought by the United States government in the two wars were scarcely comparable in ideological and political terms.  Where one sought to withdraw peaceably from a political arrangement, inasmuch as this was permitted, the other sought to expand its territory by conquering, suppressing and dominating all the nations around it.  One represented a social and political order that was, if anything, attempting to retain some combination of aristocratic and agrarian republican structures out of a profound respect for past precedents and classical models (which is, ironically, one of the reasons why Hanson, a classicist, hates the Old South so much), while the other was a rude, modernising revolutionary force that idolised the future.  At the risk of some oversimplification, the progressive Yankee nationalist could only see in the Southron his antithesis, the embodiment of virtually everything he wanted (and tried) to purge from his country, while the progressive 20th century New Dealer confronted in fascism a hostile variant of his own progressive nationalist managerial statism.  Mass democratic nationalism coupled with the beginnings of a managerial state found itself warring against an ideology with which it had a little too much affinity for some people’s comfort.  As Kuehnelt-Leddihn said of democracy, fascism and communism more generally, the intensity of the hostility between these different systems was that of a family feud, not one of diametrically opposed extremes.  The similarities between these different centralised, managerial statisms may help explain why fascism elicits so much more powerful emotional negative reactions from everyone across the spectrum, as if to overcompensate for these similarities through extra denunciation.    

James quotes from Fred Thompson:

Hansen writes [that’s Victor Davis Hanson we’re talking about here, sic; get out your copyeditors, NR-JP], “The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s.” If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it.

James credits these assessments as more or less correct (”nothing in this sequence is untrue or inaccurate”), but says also that they miss certain important distinctions that he describes thus:

One is that between Gettysburg and Normandy. Another is between Hanson’s hour of decisive bloodshed and Fred’s hoped-for ideal of eternally postponed bloodshed. And the third is between pleading and studying.

James notes many of the key differences between the wars being mentioned in the same breath.  However, I must very respectfully disagree with my learned associate on the accuracy of the Hanson remarks that Thompson quoted.  On a slightly pedantic level, I would note that Gettysburg was a battle of three days and it was the third, final day that rather made all the difference in making it into a decisive defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia rather than an inconclusive draw.  This might not be such a major objection, except that it was the decisiveness of the battle that lends it its special significance as a “turning point” in the history of the war and so gives it whatever greater importance as an event that it possesses.  It does not exactly help the cause of reviving military history studies to state inaccurately a key detail of one of the best-known battles in American history.  A little less pedantic is the objection to the apparent interpretation (very common for Americans to make) that Normandy was somehow on par with Gettysburg’s significance in the War of Secession by being the decisive turning point in WWII, when that honour really must, for better or worse, belong to Stalingrad.  A more substantive point is that, as a matter of history, the Battle of Gettysburg is not “more important” than the hundred years of debate that preceded it.  If you tried to take that attitude into an American history class today or at any time in the past as a student, you would not do very well.  With respect to the outcome of the war, the battle was an extremely significant event that brought about a sizeable change in the course of the war by ending the Confederacy’s attempts to take the war into the North and hastening ultimate Confederate defeat.  Battles can and do change the course of events in dramatic ways (see Gaugamela, Actium, Yarmuk), because wars are events of profound transformation and wars turn in no small part on the outcome of battles, but this does not make them “more important” than the decades of political argument and struggle that paved the way for the war to happen in the first place.  It is just this sort of talk that can give the study of histoire evenementielle a bad name. 

Some of its partisans rightly want to emphasise that events can be decisive and that history is contingent on events, and they then get entirely carried away by elevating these events into a category of greater significancee than the mundane, plodding periods of peace and the very real structures of institutions and the mentalities of nations.  It is as if some of these partisans cannot argue for the significance of war as a transformative force in history without implicitly (or, in this case, explicitly) devaluing everything outside of war.  Just behind this language of greater importance is the notion that it would have been better to “resolve” the conflicts that these wars “solved” earlier…by means of an earlier war.  Far from seeing war as a catastrophic failure and a great enemy of civilisation, those making this kind of argument see it as a sort of quick fix, a simple answer to very knotty questions.  It declares animosity towards brokered deals, compromises and all of the accommodations that must be made for political life to continue without violent interruption.  The opponents of this approach will quite often attribute to them a tendency to offer simplistic answers, because that is very often the kind of answer they are offering–not because they are fools, but because they really think the answer is that simple. 

The threads of life over the course of decades in all their complexity jumble into something very much like a Gordian Knot, and these folks seem rather too eager to cut right through with a sword.   Behind this is an impatience with deliberation, an intolerance for fussing about with argument and, well, a dislike for basically everything that we know of as politics.  One is reminded of Gladiator’s version of Commodus speaking to the hero: “You are a man who knows what it is to command.  You give your orders, the orders are obeyed, and the battle is won.  But these senators, they scheme and squabble, flatter, deceive.  Maximus, we must save Rome from the politicians.”  So, actually, I think there is quite a lot wrong with Hanson’s statement as quoted by Thompson. 

Thompson himself is right that universities should provide courses in military history, which would, of course, require more institutional support for hiring those with interests in military history.  Part of the reason why there is less interest and less support for those working in this area is that it is seen as being heavily focused on institutions (the military being the main one) and events, which are two kinds of historical research that are not exactly tickets to success and prominence in the discipline today.  They are not popular or fashionable because I think they are viewed as approaches that neglect too many things, unduly privilege discrete events and resemble a little too much the “one damn thing after another” school.  This may be an unfair judgement in certain ways, but because of this atmosphere that makes it that much more important that military historians adapt to at least some contemporary expectations in paying attention to social and cultural dimensions of warfare (and good military historians do exactly this).  We are caught in something of a vicious cycle, where relatively few are being trained to study these things because the study of them in the past has been seen to be lacking, which is hardly helped by proponents of reviving the study of military history making bold statements about the vastly greater importance of single decisive events.

James Poulos has a masterful post on the importance of rhetorical combat and puts the renewed calls for the study of military history into some perspective.  Any post that coherently ties together mentions of Henry Clay and The Untouchables has to win some sort of special award for creativity.

It’s magical, this Surge; no matter what happens, the evidence demonstrates that the Surge is working. It can’t fail! Any behavior taken by anyone in Iraq is a positive by-product of the Surge. I mean, sure, the Surge hasn’t dented American casualty rates or Iraqi casualty rates for the country as a whole, but that also is evidence that it’s working; the enemy is clearly desperate, which is why he’s attacking us. ~Robert Farley

Via Yglesias

In fairness to the pathological Bush-supporters, the only way to maintain support for Mr. Bush’s War and the latest security plan (a.k.a., “surge”) has to be to engage in such creative “adaptation” to changing circumstances.  If these folks had ever been disturbed by evidence from the lowly realm of the senses (a.k.a., “reality”), they would have dropped Mr. Bush and his war years ago (as have so many attuned to the inner workings of the “reality-based community”). 

The “surge” must be working at all times, because otherwise it might be time to reconsider support for the war, which might mean that support for the war was misguided in the first place, and it would also mean that Mr. Bush, the great leader (as roughly 75% of Republicans still regard him), had erred catastrophically and then persisted in his error.  The true believers know that this latter idea is impossible, because they know that Mr. Bush is good and wise and decent, etc.  They know this because they have to believe it, since otherwise that would mean that they have been backing an impressive liar and criminal buffoon.  Never underestimate the power of denial.

It’s also worth remembering that the “increasing number of attacks and casualties is proof that the enemy feels deeply threatened by the establishment of democracy” spin has been tried before, back in the days of Cheney’s “last throes” remarks in ‘05.  You almost have to admire the suppleness of war propaganda.  We have not only always been at war with Eastasia (or Westasia, in our case), but we have always been winning, though occasionally suffering massive setbacks that some traitors might call “defeat,” which is really just another name for victory if viewed from the proper party perspective. 

Warfare is like hunting.  Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force.  In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy may be many or few.  To try to simply overpower the enemy in the open, hand to hand and face to face, even though you might appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm.  Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory. ~Maurice’s Strategikon, Book VII