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mburnamfink 's review for:
Savage Wars of Peace is a decent, if unsystematic study of American military interventions prior to 1941, wedded to an ideology that has aged like a burn-pit outside Bagram Air Base.
I'll tackle the first bit. America has a long history of deploying force overseas, in gunboat diplomacy and putative expeditions stretching back to the wars against the Barbary Corsairs: "...to the shores of Tripoli", as the Marine corps hymn goes. As Toll's magisterial Six Frigates discusses, these early wars were at the pivot of a debate about the power of the Federal government and America's role in the world. The 18th century was marked by constant, if limited use of the Navy and Marines to open Japan, Korea, and China to American trade, and to punish various groups in Malaysia and the Caribbean who had decided that plundering American merchants was better than trading with them.
The Spanish-American War marked a distinct change in American policy, with the Philippines and Puerto Rico now directly ruled colonies, Cuba a protectorate, and a newly more assertive posture worldwide. A combination of Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism, and Woodrow Wilson's moralism, summed up in the statement that 'America should teach Latin Americans to elect good men', resulted in repeated interventions in Haiti and Nicaragua, as well as a protracted counter-insurgency in the Philippines, Pershing's putative expedition against Pancho Villa, which nearly resulted in an actual shooting war with Mexico, and the gunboat operations of the China patrol. Generally, small groups of American Marines outfought their local opponents with superior training and armaments. Boot takes a universally uncritical view of the American role in all these operations, arguing that American intervention was broadly popular because Americans provided hygiene and displaced local corrupt strongmen. I'm sure a historian who bothered to read what the locals involved thought would consider otherwise.
The final chapter is a brief skip through the latter half of the 20th century. Boot's take is that Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland's war of attrition destroyed American morale at home, and that the COIN side of the Combined Action Patrol (see Bing West's The Village) and Phoenix Program (Herrington's Stalking The Vietcong) showed that the war could be won. If America had the will to intervene as decisively in 1975 as it did in 1972, there'd still be a South Vietnam. This is a conclusion that I'm skeptical of. I think America would have had to intervene again in 1978, 81, etc. There's a brief skip through Desert Storm and Clinton's operations of the 90s.
This pure history isn't a bad one, per se, as a military history of forgotten American interventions. My problems are twofold, first Boot agrees completely with Kipling's 'white man's burden' thesis of history, without managing to capture any of the actual zeitgest of period, what I consider to be the highest aim of history. Second, this book includes nothing on the US Army and the Indian Wars, certainly the most protracted and decisive of American Small Wars. The relationship between the genocide of American Indians, the Federal government, and historiography is a complex one, but to write an entire book on Small Wars without discussing Custer or Geronimo is a curious choice-perhaps because it's impossible to fit genocide into Boot's theoretical framework that imperialism is both authentically American and generally good for all concerned.
And that theoretical framework is where this book stinks. The book was written in that halcyon 'End of History' prior to 9/11, and published immediately afterwards, before the true nature of the quagmire of Afghanistan and the fiasco of Iraq had sunk in to public perception. Assessing the total cost of the War of Terror and its children is foolhardy, but the total cost cannot be considered anything less than high. Around $45 billion per year, as the Afghanistan War becomes old enough vote, according to the Pentagon's numbers. Perhaps $5.9 TRILLION, according to the Crawford Report.
If these are Small Wars, I shudder to think of what a big one would look like. And that doesn't even include the human costs to American soldiers, and to especially the Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemeni (among many others) on the receiving end of "American liberty".
Since publishing this book, Boot has gone on to a successful career as a chickenhawk Washington Post columnist and perpetually owned twitter figure. He lacks the truly sublime idiocy of a Thomas Friedman or David Brooks, but he's still out there, saying America should bomb some more people, and getting wrecked on Twitter. I picked this book up for a dollar at a used book sale, I almost decided to toss it away unread when I saw Boot's name on. And I persisted in reading just so I could write a very sarcastic review.
I'll tackle the first bit. America has a long history of deploying force overseas, in gunboat diplomacy and putative expeditions stretching back to the wars against the Barbary Corsairs: "...to the shores of Tripoli", as the Marine corps hymn goes. As Toll's magisterial Six Frigates discusses, these early wars were at the pivot of a debate about the power of the Federal government and America's role in the world. The 18th century was marked by constant, if limited use of the Navy and Marines to open Japan, Korea, and China to American trade, and to punish various groups in Malaysia and the Caribbean who had decided that plundering American merchants was better than trading with them.
The Spanish-American War marked a distinct change in American policy, with the Philippines and Puerto Rico now directly ruled colonies, Cuba a protectorate, and a newly more assertive posture worldwide. A combination of Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism, and Woodrow Wilson's moralism, summed up in the statement that 'America should teach Latin Americans to elect good men', resulted in repeated interventions in Haiti and Nicaragua, as well as a protracted counter-insurgency in the Philippines, Pershing's putative expedition against Pancho Villa, which nearly resulted in an actual shooting war with Mexico, and the gunboat operations of the China patrol. Generally, small groups of American Marines outfought their local opponents with superior training and armaments. Boot takes a universally uncritical view of the American role in all these operations, arguing that American intervention was broadly popular because Americans provided hygiene and displaced local corrupt strongmen. I'm sure a historian who bothered to read what the locals involved thought would consider otherwise.
The final chapter is a brief skip through the latter half of the 20th century. Boot's take is that Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland's war of attrition destroyed American morale at home, and that the COIN side of the Combined Action Patrol (see Bing West's The Village) and Phoenix Program (Herrington's Stalking The Vietcong) showed that the war could be won. If America had the will to intervene as decisively in 1975 as it did in 1972, there'd still be a South Vietnam. This is a conclusion that I'm skeptical of. I think America would have had to intervene again in 1978, 81, etc. There's a brief skip through Desert Storm and Clinton's operations of the 90s.
This pure history isn't a bad one, per se, as a military history of forgotten American interventions. My problems are twofold, first Boot agrees completely with Kipling's 'white man's burden' thesis of history, without managing to capture any of the actual zeitgest of period, what I consider to be the highest aim of history. Second, this book includes nothing on the US Army and the Indian Wars, certainly the most protracted and decisive of American Small Wars. The relationship between the genocide of American Indians, the Federal government, and historiography is a complex one, but to write an entire book on Small Wars without discussing Custer or Geronimo is a curious choice-perhaps because it's impossible to fit genocide into Boot's theoretical framework that imperialism is both authentically American and generally good for all concerned.
And that theoretical framework is where this book stinks. The book was written in that halcyon 'End of History' prior to 9/11, and published immediately afterwards, before the true nature of the quagmire of Afghanistan and the fiasco of Iraq had sunk in to public perception. Assessing the total cost of the War of Terror and its children is foolhardy, but the total cost cannot be considered anything less than high. Around $45 billion per year, as the Afghanistan War becomes old enough vote, according to the Pentagon's numbers. Perhaps $5.9 TRILLION, according to the Crawford Report.
If these are Small Wars, I shudder to think of what a big one would look like. And that doesn't even include the human costs to American soldiers, and to especially the Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemeni (among many others) on the receiving end of "American liberty".
Since publishing this book, Boot has gone on to a successful career as a chickenhawk Washington Post columnist and perpetually owned twitter figure. He lacks the truly sublime idiocy of a Thomas Friedman or David Brooks, but he's still out there, saying America should bomb some more people, and getting wrecked on Twitter. I picked this book up for a dollar at a used book sale, I almost decided to toss it away unread when I saw Boot's name on. And I persisted in reading just so I could write a very sarcastic review.