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Summary: Small Wars Lost At Home Not on Battlefield
Review: How Democracy Loses Small Wars is perhaps one of the most-timely, but unrecognized books dealing with the so-called "quagmire" and war prisoner abuse situations the U.S. has encountered in Iraq in 2004. Gil Merom addresses how modern democracies lose small wars against weaker forces. Merom writes that small wars are lost mostly at home not on the battlefield when a highly media-visible minority of the educated upper middle class selectively views with moral revulsion the brutality and casualties necessary to win war. In response, government war leaders resort to repress the ugly realities of war by deceit, censure, and crackdowns, attracting even more media attention.
Merom offers three case studies of the outcomes of small wars: the French Algerian War, the Israeli Lebanon War, and the U.S. Vietnam War. It is not the Vietnam War but the French war against Algerian independence from 1954-60 that may offer the best history lesson for the U.S.-Iraq war. France sought to hold onto its empire and oil and gas resources in a mostly Muslim country. The French had overwhelming military power. There were low casualties. The public supported the war despite concerns about the economy. The conflict entailed mostly urban guerilla warfare where one third of the casualties were due to ambushes. And the war was portrayed as a struggle between "forces of light and those of darkness." Sound familiar? France won the battles but lost the war and had to eventually pull out. Its citizens would no longer tolerate the suppression of wartime abuses by criminalizing the press, the seizing of antiwar literature, and invoking the military draft. So look for the Iraq war to be lost not in Fallujah or Kandahar, but in Berkeley, Paris, or more lately, in Madrid or Abu Ghraib prison. Look for the war to be lost if U.S. forces resort to war crimes, cover-ups, abuses of the Patriot Act, and succumbing to provocations of anti-war activists. Thus far, the Bush administration has court-martialed those who have committed abuses, has reluctantly admitted to no WMD's rather than attempting a cover up, and have avoided anything like the opinion galvanizing incident of the 1970 Kent State University National Guard killing of student Vietnam anti-war protesters in response to the provocation of burning down the campus ROTC building. Merom offers good analysis of the interaction between the military and civilian battlefields. His book could have been enhanced by an analysis of how, what sociologists Alvin Gouldner and Peter Berger call the "new class" are able to socially construct the military as comprising the moral low ground. As to the quest for capturing the moral high ground in the Iraq War, perhaps the often self-indulgent anti-war activists could be reminded of the tragic moral consequences of the aftermath of abandoning Vietnam - the Killing Fields, the Boat People émigrés, and the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
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