Vol. XVIII No. 2, Fall 1998
Book Reviews
Martin, David. Does Christianity Cause War?
Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Does Christianity Cause War? David Martin's recently published lectures given at the Sarum Lectureship at the University
of Oxford answer the question: "The evidence does not bear out the contention [that Christianity causes war]. The case
falls." Because he chooses to answer clearly he will undoubtedly evoke an equally definitive response. Those who respond
will need considerable evidence since it is objective human experience that moves the argument forward.
Professor Martin considers whether human nature or religion is the "singular virus which more than anything else
undermines reason and persuades us to evil courses." He concludes this is neither - at least completely. The most powerful
casus belli is a complex and often confused blurring of nationalistic principles of which religion is only a single marker.
Accordingly, the "argument from Bosnia" that places religion as "a deadly psychological evasion and a social suction," is
more aptly a corruption beginning in the fourth century with the temptation of establishment where the Church merged
with the political powers of the state and, thereby, corrupted the principles of the faith. Moreover, this idea that religion,
Christianity in particular, can alone move men toward war is oversimplified. Martin challenges zoologist Richard Dawkins
who insists that the certainty resulting from religious indoctrination correlates directly to war making. Martin examines the
evidence and finds that each situation, whether it be in Europe, North America or Asia, is too complex to make such grand
"generalizations." It neither matters where the war takes place nor who is engaged in the combat. Because any peace at any
time is hard to keep under the best of circumstances, Martin suggests that "a radical and peaceable universalism embodied
in the foundation documents of Christianity" offers the best prescription against war making.
In the lectures, Martin challenges the interpretation of contemporary reality that so often faults Christianity, recognizing
that nationalistic groups continue to claim religious justification in committing great atrocities. Martin does not avoid that
troubling fact of life, but he remarks that he can find no evidence to prove that a decline in religiosity, or a minimized
religious marker, results in a similar decrease in enmity. It is, again, a myriad of social markers established over centuries
that mobilize these groups to war. Martin is quick to recognize, and this is where the power of his argument is most
compelling, that the Christianity he refers to is very different from the incorporated religion of the state. Look toward the
early Church Martin advises. There you will see Christianity at its most primitive state and, arguably, at its best.
Nonetheless, in later centuries Christianity along with most powerful religious organizations often infused raison d'etat.
Martin writes, "[T]hroughout the early phases of differentiation, religion remained in partial alliance with organicist
ideologies, for example, monarchical absolutism, enlightened autocracy (or oligarchy), and secular populist nationalism."
However, when considering the current state of the Christian community and the future potential associated with that
community "Christianity acquires a greater capacity than secular society to provide an independent and distinctive
socialization." According to Martin, that socialization is conciliation and peaceability. This insistence upon the ethic of
love as the motivator for action in the world is the real effect of Christianity.
This collection of lectures is well worth careful consideration. Martin does an outstanding job of engaging the culture of
the academy in his argument. Moreover, because he insists upon untying the knots of real human experience, employing
material from Britain, the United States, Latin America and Romania, he is compelling. Students of religion and teachers
alike will find this information useful.
W. King Mott, Jr.,
Seton Hall University
Suganami, Hidemi, On the Causes of War.
Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996.
In On the Causes of War, Hidemi Suganami reflects on one of the perennial questions that challenge students of
international politics - that of the causes of war. Suganami, already well-known in the field of international relations theory
for his earlier work, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
once more seeks to apply the philosophy of social science to the analysis of approaches put forward in the attempt to
understand and explain international politics.
In this case, he examines such efforts as Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press,
1959) and Keith L. Nelson and Spencer C. Olin's Why War? Ideology, Theory and History (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1980), and seeks to clarify the questions at issue. He does not dismiss such works but
does suggest that some clarification can be achieved by distinguishing among three questions: "What conditions are
required for wars to take place? What circumstances make war more or less likely? and How did a specific war come to
take place?" Waltz considers three approaches to the explanation of the causes of war; they focus on human nature, the
state and the absence of an overall authority in the international system. While he identifies some substance in each
approach, Waltz sees the anarchic character of the international system as ultimately the fundamental precondition for the
outbreak of war. Suganami asserts that the anarchic character of international politics emphasized by Waltz is either trivial
or tautological as an answer if one is asking what preconditions are necessary if war is to take place, and entirely
inadequate if we are interested in determining either what factors make the outbreak of war more or less likely, or what
brought about any particular war. Nelson and Olin's emphasis on domestic politics, assuming that domestic discord and
instability breeds aggressiveness toward other states, fails, according to Suganami, to account for the variety of factors that
lead in particular instances to the outbreak of war.
While Suganami finds the discussions of R.J. Rummel, Victor Wallace and Doyle in regards to the apparent correlation of
certain phenomena, such as domestic instability, arms races or dyadic liberalism respectively to be suggestive, he cautions
that such hypotheses require further study and, while typically presented as simply correlations, do entail implicit
assumptions about causation that, in each case, fail to capture the range of factors that influence the actual outbreak of war
in specific cases.
Suganami's own view is that:
. . . war origins are quite diverse especially with respect to their backgrounds, the operation of war-conducive mechanisms,
and the influence of chance coincidences; and that the first two of these three items are often considered as the underlying
causes of war; that there are, however, some family resemblances amongst war origins; and that these are due chiefly to the
limited number of ways in which relevant governments can be said to have acted in making their key moves in the partially
overlapping processes resulting in the outbreaks of war. (p. 206)
Much of the book consists of critiques of previous work on the causes of war. Suganami adopts a somewhat skeptical
approach, not necessarily dismissing the findings of such work but stressing the limitations and tentativeness of such
findings. He is consistent when he presents his own hypotheses, emphasizing the range of factors and the inescapable
elements of chance and coincidence. Such a scrupulous approach is appropriate so long as students of international conflict
are not intimidated from raising hypotheses and exploring potentially fruitful avenues of enquiry. One of the merits of
Suganami's own approach is his assertion of the salience of political leadership. Without dismissing the influence of the
structure of the international system, he insists on the urgency of examining how decisions made by political actors impact
on the incidence of war. By making the point that states do, albeit within certain constraints, make choices, selecting one
course of action in preference to alternatives, Suganami asserts an important role for examination of the ethical issues
entailed in such decision-making.
On the Causes of War should be considered required reading for serious students of international conflict. It will make
challenging but fascinating reading.
James G. Mellon
Halifax, NS
Lomperis, Timothy J. From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of
Vietnam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
For many Americans and any number of scholars, the Vietnam War is a defining moment in American history. This is also
true for many in the military. Among other things, the Vietnam War is seen as part of the major lessons of war. However,
the author of this book views the Vietnam War as a non-lesson contrary to traditional views of lessons of war. The author
writes, "But Vietnam is a better ghost that a lesson . . . it can be summoned for any lesson a conjurer wants." (p. 10) A more
acceptable approach, according to the author, is to view the Vietnam War in definitional and contextual terms. It must be
defined and placed in the context of case studies. He argues that only by a comparative context can proper lessons be
drawn. "General lessons can rarely stand on a simple case." (p. 9) While some may disagree with that view, the author
makes a good case for his thesis. The two major questions that drive the author's study are as follows: first, what makes a
successful insurgency? Second, what is the most effective method and scope of Western intervention? In turn each of these
questions embrace a number of elements. The author spends a great deal of time explaining and applying these two
questions to Vietnam.
Defining legitimacy as the justification of authority of political rule, the author provides an in-depth, if complex view of
the various elements of political rule. An insurgency "is a challenge to authority." (p. 32) Insurgency is further defined as a
revolution making it distinct from insurrection. The author acknowledges that there are a number of other explanations of
political legitimacy and insurgencies. But he places them secondary to his own perspective.
In terms of what makes a successful insurgency, the primary issue is political legitimacy. He posits six thematic questions
ranging from a historical perspective to comparisons of legitimacy in terms of the insurgents in each case study with that of
Vietnam.
The study of insurgency and political legitimacy is followed by an examination of intervention and American policy. The
author begins with an overview of the American policy.
[T]he international context for this pursuit of the lessons of Vietnam is that the Vietnam War and the other insurgencies
studied here were part of a larger, international-level duel between the U.S. foreign policy of containment, and its
promotion of evolutionary development, and the communist strategy of people's war, and its call for revolutionary
insurgency, over which was the best way in the Third World to bring about some equivalent to this earlier political
transformation in the West. (p. 42)
Following an elaborate presentation of an analytical framework using Vietnam as the reference point, the author develops
a comparative study of Vietnam and other insurgencies. The case studies are China, 1920-49; Greece, 1941-49; The
Philippines, 1946-56; Malaya, 1948-60; Cambodia and Laos, 1949-75; and Sendero Luminoso, Peru. In these cases, the
West intervened in insurgencies that basically followed the Marxian people's war concepts, as established by Mao Zedong
or by key members of the Indochinese Communist Party. Referring to other internal wars, the author makes a distinction
between Marxian people's war strategy and people's wars in general. Beginning with a brief overview of the history of
insurgency in the various countries, the author draws conclusions about the two fundamental questions underpinning the
book. After assessing the success or failure of people's war in each case study, he compares these to Vietnam, which he
calls a deviant case.
The author categorizes the eight case studies as five successful and three failed insurgencies. The insurgency failures were
in Greece, the Huks in the Philippines and Malaya. The failed insurgencies were characterized by the continuing political
legitimacy of the existing system and Western intervention that maintained or reinforced that legitimacy. The other cases
were successful insurgencies characterized by political legitimacy and a Western intervention that eroded the legitimacy of
the existing system. Vietnam was a deviant case because, "Saigon fell, not to the popular uprising of a revolution but to the
conquering invasion of a conventional army." (p. 110)
The author is steadfast in his concept of political legitimacy, the elements of a successful insurgency, and the optimal
method of Western intervention.
The efficacy of an intervention will succeed or fail on the basis of its effect on the definitional grounds of political
legitimacy in the affected society. . .The basic lesson of Vietnam and its companion prismatic cases remains the beacon of
democracy, and of a vigorous promotion of it by the United States. (p. 321)
In reference to Vietnam, the author argues that instead of containment, America needs to focus on "[G]lobal
democratization in order to redeem the unfulfilled quest of America's longest war." (p. 29) He concludes that the
"[V]ictorious era of People's Wars has yielded to one of people's rule in that we live in a more sober period in which
historical forces in the Third World between incumbents and insurgents (or reformists and revolutionaries) has become
more evenly matched." (p. 315) Four factors create the conditions for this new era. These range from the declining
advantage of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries to a new approach favoring "rule over revolution."
The author's study, often hinting of a "labor of love," encompasses a mass of material, analytical insights, and useful
comparative frameworks. There are extensive references to the existing literature. Also, there are more than 60 pages of
endnotes and more than 20 pages of appendices.
The analytical effort, however, is periodically overshadowed by the confusing array of questions, themes, elements within
each question, and a variety of considerations qualifying one or the other element. For example, in writing about US
containment policy, the author identifies two tracks and four handicaps. While this can be digested, it is difficult to digest
the concept of transition from tradition to modern society. This concept involves "four cuts" ranging from "Three Levels of
Legitimation - First Cut" to "Foreign Intervention - Fourth Cut." In the section on foreign intervention, two traditional
methods are discussed followed by three ways in which the intervention is altered. This fine-tuning is characteristic of the
entire book. While such an approach may be important to the analyst, it is difficult for the average reader to follow and
decipher.
One can also question the author's concept of people's rule and the assertion about the spread of people's rule (democracy?)
around the globe. It may be that people's rule and democracy have different meaning within various cultures. In this
respect, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations may be the more appropriate perspective: different people define
people's rule and democracy according to their own cultural parameters. Not necessarily according to Western notions.
There will be some who will disagree with the author's assessment of Vietnam as a non-lesson in traditional terms. For
example, Harry Summer's works on Vietnam, H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, and Robert McNamara, In Retrospect,
offer different views of the lessons of Vietnam.
The author's in-depth analysis and complex framework defy a balanced assessment in a brief review. In any case, the
author should be applauded for a comprehensive and in-depth study and analysis. The study provides another dimension of
the Vietnam War in a comparative context that should prove important in analyzing that war and other conflicts. Moreover,
the author's assessment is useful in analyzing the role of the United States in operations other than war in the current
period. But as noted earlier, the number of concepts, frameworks, sub-concepts, additional frameworks, and lingering
questions and themes undercut the impact of the book, and detracts from the author's major conclusions. Regardless of
these problems, the book is an important contribution to the literature. It is recommended for those who are involved in the
study of insurgency, revolution, and US policy.
Sam C. Sarkesian
Loyola University Chicago
Cann, John P. Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961-1974. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1997.
John Cann's study dealing with the Portuguese attempt to curb, if not eradicate, the pro-independence African armies in
Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau is yet another indication of scholarly (and sometimes polemical) interest in how
wars were lost by colonial (or major) powers. Vietnam and the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) are cases in point of
this near growth industry. By way of contrast, the (three) wars in Lusophone Africa have generated less popular interest
than the Vietnamese or even Algerian wars, and the community of Africanists has tended to be more fascinated by
anti-colonial success rather than by colonial failure. Such wars seem to be consigned to the musty world of case studies for
military command and staff colleges. They have produced no major motion pictures or great war novels. These three
African wars for independence have too small an audience if only because many Western commentators were fascinated by
the political and economic ineptness or failures of those Angolan and Mozambiquan post-colonial regimes with
Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and trappings. Few were the Americans or Canadians who had the requisite language skills and
military expertise to write intelligently about the wars in Lusophone Africa.
The basic argument is that Portugal ". . . mobilized an army, transported it many thousands of kilometers to its African
colonies, established large logistical bases at key locations there to support it, equipped it with special weapons and
matériel, and trained it for a very specialized type of warfare . . ." It did so, contends the author, ". . . without any previous
experience, doctrine, or demonstrated competence in the field of either power projection or counterinsurgency warfare, and
. . . without . . . any instructors who were competent in these specialties." (p. 1 for both quotations). Thus, what Dr. Cann
termed the Portuguese way of war ". . . focused on a subdued, low-tempo style of fighting that was a function of its
constrained resources and low technology." (p. 187)
What is particularly appealing about this study by a retired US naval officer, who earned a doctoral degree in war studies
from King's College of the University of London, is his demonstrable access to the Portuguese military establishment and
sources. The author makes the most of his interviews and correspondence with those officers who fought in the three
campaigns as well as of the Lisbon-based records of the armed forces. This enables him to track down the flow (and
revisions), say, of counterinsurgency doctrine from the British and Americans. The Americans, however, tended to be
ahistorical in terms of comparative civil-military affairs, and military lessons tended to be forgotten not long after they
were written down. Only recently, for example, has there been a resurgence of studies dealing with US counterinsurgency
in the Philippines in the Spanish-American War; the fascination in counterinsurgency literature had centered on the Huk
rebellion in the Philippines just after the close of the Second World War.
Such wars are difficult to fight for they often run counter to large-scale principles of troop organization, to say nothing of
military sub-cultures that may emphasize different sets of career incentives, or civic cultures that place a premium on
patience and even tolerate opaqueness in military results. Wars of this sort are fraught with consequences for the
counterinsurgent power, as the American experience in Vietnam so cogently demonstrates. Cann's study is a welcome
addition to the literature of comparative guerrilla warfare studies particularly because of its consistent concern with what
the Portuguese armed forces learned, where they learned it, from whom they learned it, and how they passed on these
lessons to the troops in the field. The author deftly weaves into his analysis and description reference to what the British,
French, and Americans did (well or ineptly) or failed to do, and the consequences of such action or inaction.
Particularly significant is his treatment of how the Portuguese armed forces developed a sustainable counterinsurgency
doctrine, drawing upon previous French and British practice, and then implemented that doctrine in the field. What
intrigues the author is how a relatively small nation, with a dwindling pool of manpower, and modest levels of technology
managed to continue to wage war in three African territories (Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique) for no less than
thirteen years. Part of the success is due to Portugal's ability to recruit, equip, and train a wide array of specialized units
from local populations, including Bushmen in Angola (who served with equal distinction in the South African Defense
Force in Namibia). This offset the shortfall in the metropolitan recruitment area and reduced long-range troop
transportation costs from Portugal to the African colonies. The metropolitan-recruited soldiers, however, became casualties
at a higher proportionate rate than their African fellow soldiers, thus undercutting the argument that shifting the
recruitment base would put the Africans at greater risk than their Portuguese comrades-in-arms. There was political
opposition to the African wars in non-democratic Portugal, conscription evasion, and increased taxation; the colonial wars
were terminated as a result of the 1974 military coup d'état which, much later, led to a democratic system and acceptance
into the European community.
This study is exemplary in its tight organization and attention to detail, which will make it attractive to military readers,
and its topical arrangement of chapters facilitates comparative analysis with American, French, and British military
doctrine, organizations and techniques. Paradoxically, the relative poverty of the Portuguese nation prompted its military to
fashion its military organization and order of battle, as well as civic action and resettlement programs, in a parsimonious
manner. Less was sometimes better, particularly when the Portuguese army reconfigured itself into a counterinsurgency
machine by stressing the light infantry structure (which the Americans did not do when fighting in Vietnam) and integrated
its African and non-African troops (which neither the British nor the French had done). The Portuguese military did hold
the African nationalists at bay for quite some time and provided some degree of political space for the resolution of the
conflict. They could not, however, compete with these nationalists in terms of legitimacy, as the author correctly notes (on
p. 194). The bibliography, which includes works in both Portuguese and English, is quite helpful, but the index is not as
detailed as it ought to be, and the four maps are only adequate. They author could have added more material on the role of
the Portuguese African military forces in the First World War, some of whom did battle in Mozambique with the legendary
German Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who held out against the British and their allies in German East
Africa (later Tanganyika) throughout the entire First World War and earned the admiration of both friend and foe. It is his
contention (on p. 95) that ever so little is known about Portugal's African army in the First World War; if so, why not
enlighten the historians among his readers? Certainly, von Lettow-Vorbeck is well-known as a superb guerrilla fighter who
earned the highest German decoration, Pour le Mérite, from the Kaiser. His opponents merit some, if not necessarily equal,
attention.
Richard Dale
Fountain Hills, Arizona
Williams, Philip J. and Knut Walter. Militarization and Demilitarization in El Salvador's Transition to
Democracy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
In the past decade negotiated settlements ended armed conflicts in Central America that killed hundreds of thousands. The
Esquipulas regional peace framework and subsequent national agreements brought civil wars to an end, demobilized
guerrilla insurgents, and led to a significant reduction in the power and size of the armed forces. Philip Williams and Knut
Walter's study is a nuanced examination of how democratization is more than transfer of power from a military government
to elected civilians. Their book considers how "the extent and nature of militarization in El Salvador during the period
1931-1992 produced powerful obstacles that limited the possibilities for demilitarization in the wake of the peace accords."
(p. 9)
Militarization and Demilitarization employs a "historical-structural perspective" (p. 3) to point out the legacies of military
involvement in politics, and how such patterns limit current options for civil-military relations. A theoretical introduction
places the study of the Salvadoran military in the context of secondary literature on democratization and military politics.
Four historical chapters document the expansion of the military's political control as a result of key events: the 1932
Matanza, efforts at reform in the 1940s-1960s, the 1969 Soccer War with Honduras, and the October 1979 coup. Special
attention is given to the 1980s, a period in which elections, democratic reforms and cycles of state repression characterized
civil-military relations during the civil war (1980-92). An additional section considers the positive and negative aspects of
the 1992 peace accords for democracy and civilian-subordinated armed forces in El Salvador. Finally, the authors attempt
to draw lessons from the Salvadoran experience for other cases of civil-military relations, demilitarization and
democratization. Williams and Walter stress that "the fundamental challenge for policy makers is to craft policies that
reduce the military's political power but at the same time limit the potential for conflict." (p. 2)
Williams and Walter's scholarship is evident in their use of Salvadoran government documents, military data, US
government and United Nations sources, interviews with civilian and military actors, and the extensive secondary
literature. The use of tables on officer factions, the Salvadoran command structure, troop strength and budgets, and US aid
during the civil war, greatly compliment the narrative. The work is convincing because it focuses on internal aspects of the
armed forces, as well as the shifting societal and international contexts in which the military has acted. The military's
original mission (dating to the 1870s) was coercing peasants to cultivate coffee, and supporting the status quo interests of
landed elites.1 Although agricultural elites were able to block agrarian reform, the military evolved toward putting the
institutional interests of the armed forces ahead of those of landed elites.
Also noteworthy is the comparison made between El Salvador and the experiences of demilitarization in Nicaragua and
Guatemala. The authors lament the lack of research on Central American militaries, yet this situation has changed
recently.2 Williams and Walter note (pp. 186- 96) four lessons gained from their analysis of El Salvador: negotiated
settlements to internal wars offer good opportunities to reduce military power and restructure civil-military relations;
initiatives from politicians and civil society matter; when openness to change comes from within the military, success is
more likely; and the role of international actors is central to such transitions. If we consider the first point, the Sandinista
Army was greatly reduced and redefined after the 1988 ceasefire and 1990 electoral transition. Guatemala's military was
also reduced, but it remained relatively more autonomous. The elimination of paramilitary organizations in El Salvador
was in part, the result of civil society pressure. However, legislative oversight, civilian mastery of military science, and
civil-military contacts remain inadequate in El Salvador. The situation is similar in Guatemala and Nicaragua, where the
development of independent legislative and judicial branches is still incomplete.
Nicaraguan officers' proposals for the reduction and reorientation of the army exemplify Williams and Walter's third point.
In other nations officers have resisted efforts to revise the armed forces' structure, practices and doctrines. Salvadoran
military officers were divided before 1992 on the basis of whether to respond to citizen demands with reform or repression,
and by generation (the tanda system). After the war there was opposition to losing control over domestic police powers and
the right of military officials to administer state agencies. The dangers to democratization and human rights from the armed
forces' efforts to promote paramilitary groups were painfully clear in Guatemala (the Civilian Self-Defense Patrols,
abolished by the 1996 accords), and presently, in Colombia. In the latter country, the executive branch and courts have
sanctioned the formation of private militias tied to the armed forces.
The role of international actors, such as the United States and the United Nations, was crucial for what was achieved in El
Salvador and Guatemala. The US pressured military officers to reform in return for continued aid, and the UN monitored
the implementation of the accords, and sponsored truth commissions (that in turn discouraged legal impunity for the
military). In contrast, Nicaragua did not convene a truth commission to detail the events of the war, and few new
institutions were created, such as the Human Rights Prosecutor and National Civilian Police in El Salvador. If we consider
these lessons for a potential demilitarization of Colombia after four decades of guerrilla war, the impact of
military-generated initiatives and international mediation may prove essential. Three previous Colombian presidents have
tried negotiations, but military and guerrilla opposition to talks, and paramilitary violence against leftist unions, parties and
demobilized insurgents, have been causes of failed negotiations. Militarization and Demilitarization should be read by
students of Central American politics, as well as by those interested in the broader issues of civil-military relations,
democratization and conflict resolution.
Andrew J. Stein
Tennessee Technological University
Endnotes
1. See Robert G. Williams, States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics,
Military Extortion and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996).
2. On Nicaragua, see Roberto J. Cajina, Transición política y reconversión militar en Nicaragua, 1990-1995, (Managua,
1997); on Guatemala, see James Dunkerley and Rachel Sieder, "The Military: The Challenge of Transition," in Rachel
Sieder, ed., Central America: Fragile Transition, (London: St. Martin's, 1996), pp. 55-101; and works in Spanish by
Gabriel Aguilera and Raul Benítez.
Marquis, Susan L. Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces. Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 1997.
This is an outstanding account of the struggles by which US special forces acquired unprecedented size, broad missions,
and eminence within the Department of Defense, following near demise after the Vietnam War. It is a much less satisfying
description of what unconventional warfare is, and how it can be employed to advantage in our time. The author's emphasis
may well reflect the US military establishment's powerful tendency to be guided by internal factors more than by what it is
to accomplish. Hence the book is longest on how we got what we have, modest on what we've got, and sketchy on what it's
all good for.
The book opens with a brief but good service by service history of US special operations in World War II and in Vietnam.
It explains both the "specialty" and the utility of those operations. Special forces must get behind enemy lines by dropping
from the air, by walking through difficult terrain, or by swimming - preferably at night. Once on the spot, they gather
intelligence, kill some especially important individuals while rescuing others, destroy or capture key installations, or
energize native guerrillas. Because the "specials" are unequipped to confront the enemy's main forces, their exemplar
physical strength and their unusual capacity to adapt to foreign environments are intended primarily to avoid combat. Such
troops are most useful when their target is small, very important to overall operations, and reachable only by stealth. For
special forces to survive, much less succeed, security and intelligence must be flawless. Above all, special operations work
best in the closest possible coordination with successful conventional forces. Any commander who confuses special forces
with shock troops, or who thinks that special operations are magic bullets, wastes them. In World War II the effectiveness
of the teams dropped behind enemy lines increased geometrically with the approach of victorious allied troops.
In Vietnam, US special forces largely failed although they performed many individual feats. That is because they were
used for stand-alone operations or as mere adjuncts to conventional operations, rather than as the keys to unlock doors to
strategic success. Marquis recounts a poignant incident in which some special forces in Vietnam were ordered to open a
road - in an area inhabited by a tribe that hated the tribe whom they were leading. Never mind the theoretical and
anthropological quibbling, headquarters said. Get on the team! Marquis does not mention that in Vietnam the misuse of
every kind of force was an inescapable consequence of the fact that American commanders were fighting to win.
The bulk of the book is about the campaign to rebuild the components of American special operations on the foundations
of the culture and skills left over from the Vietnam war and embodied in the Army's Rangers, the Navy's SEALS, and the
Air Force's commandos. The image d'epinal that drove the initial quantitative rebuilding was the failure of the mission to
rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980. By 1983, the Reagan administration had ordered enough long-range helicopters
and trained enough personnel to render unlikely the repetition of that disaster. Then came the invasion of Grenada, in
which a plethora of special forces were disastrously misused. This additional epinal spurred further coordination. The
bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut added the concern that in an age of international terrorism America must
have more forces that can pop out of land, sea and air to strike enemies quickly and surely.
These images, however, would have counted for nothing had they not been ably used by a dedicated cadre of activists in
the military, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, on Capitol Hill and in the press. Marquis makes clear that the men
who caused the establishment of special operations as almost a military service of its own, with its own unified command,
its own Assistant Secretary of Defense, and its own "checkbook" were moved less by these images or even by cold
calculations of military utility than by a love of the culture of the special forces.
By far the most instructive part of the book - though the most boring - is the account of the campaign for the establishment
of the Special Operations Command, (SOCOM), and the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Special Operations, Low Intensity
Conflict), (SOLIC). It took hearings, a press campaign, pressures and arguments within the services and the administration
to achieve success. Most of all it took doing everything again and again and again, as opponents shifted ground and
willfully interpreted previous actions and decisions that amounted to "yes," as saying "no." The bureaucratic infighting is
wearying just to read about. The struggle burned up the careers of the most active activists. They won, but suffered for it. In
Washington, no good deed goes unpunished. This account will strike a chord with anyone who has waged any battle for
innovation in US defense. It certainly reminded me of battles in which I have been involved regarding missile defense, and
the organization of the intelligence agencies. The most ominous note in that chord is the realization that even with an
excellent network on the Hill, in the press, and in the Pentagon, the advocates of SOCOM-SOLIC would not have
succeeded unless they had been able to point to piles of dead bodies supposedly resulting from the failure to take the
actions they advised.
The book closes with descriptions of the fruits of the new organization. Here the author is obviously reaching. Having
noted that better antiterrorism was one of the selling points for the reforms, she mentions no attempts to use the new tools
for antiterrorist purposes. Indeed, most of the successes she claims for special forces in our time come from traditional
psychological operations and civil affairs units, more or less arbitrarily added to the new special operations commands. The
biggest success she mentions for actual special forces was the SEALs' contribution to the deceptive threat of a landing in
occupied Kuwait in 1991. In other instances she relates the foolish use of SEALs in Panama to attack along a thousand foot
aircraft runway, without cover, and the use of Army special forces to helicopter into a bridgehead - which any airmobile
soldiers could do. The author raises the possibility that in its eagerness to find a special bailiwick for the special forces, the
new headquarters might actually reduce their usefulness to ordinary military operations.
The book's final thought is that the current fashion for military operations other than war - what might be called lite
missions - seem to be tailor made for the new special forces. The author wishes loudly that the bureaucrats at
SOCOM-SOLIC might think less about purely headquarters matters and give some consideration to actually using their
new tools to do some good. But here is the rub. The book shows that not only the special operators, who might well be
excused, but also the people whose business it is to think about what good the use of force might do are concerned with
anything and everything but the connection between military operations and the results thereof. The author seems to be
following fashion by deeming successful any mission in which the forces do what they were ordered to do, regardless of
whether the mission was well conceived to achieve a worthwhile result or not. Unfortunately, the popularity among policy
makers and academics of "lite" missions and of the forces that perform them seems to be due in no small part to the
misconception that one does not have to think as rigorously about them as one would about real wars.
It would be unfortunate if America's increased capacity for special operations were to further encourage the sloppy
thinking about the ends and means of war that has become endemic in our time.
Angelo M. Codevilla
Boston University
Boyne, Walter J. Beyond the Wild Blue: A History of the United States Air Force, 1947-1997. New
York: St. Martin's, 1997.
Few people have lived a part of history and then been able to write objectively about that history. Walter Boyne has written
passionately about the first 50 years of the United States Air Force as only one who has been a member of the Air Force
could. He is unapologetic for his admiration and respect for those leaders both in uniform and in the civilian leadership of
the United States whose vision, determination and political savvy have helped create what is arguably the most effective
instrument of destructive power on the planet. Because of his career as an Air Force pilot and director of the National Air
and Space Museum, he has first hand experience of battles in the air, in the squadron and in the politics of Washington. He
writes both from direct knowledge and from his personal contact with many of the key leaders from throughout most of the
Air Force's 50 years.
A central theme of the book is the tradition of innovation and planning for the future that was begun by Gen. Henry "Hap"
Arnold. One of America's first military aviators, Gen. Arnold, more than any one individual, helped mold the structure and
the vision of the Air Force. The unbelievable results we see today with stealth aircraft and laser guided weapons are the
natural result of the investment by the Air Force in the research and development of weapons to fight "the next war" rather
than the last one. Although Arnold retired before it became an independent service, because of his leadership and vision he
was made the first, and to date, the only five star General of the Air Force.
Boyne sets the scene with a summary of US military air power from the time of the first Wright flyers. He then leads us
through the many changes in the Air Force over its first 50 years. The wars won and lost as well as the periods of tension
when the battles were fought in Congress are both described from the perspective of a loyal member of the team.
Particularly valuable is the credit and attention which Boyne pays to the non-combat branches of the Air Force. These
organizations include, among others, Air Training Command, now Air Education and Training Command, which is
responsible for the ongoing education and training of all Air Force members. Also described are Air Force Systems
Command and Air Force Logistics Command, now combined into Air Force Material Command. They have been
responsible for the design, development, acquisition and maintenance of the aircraft, weapons, communications systems,
and all the coordination with industry to assure that the Air Force can fight. Boyne also very appropriately credits much of
the Air Force's success to the talented and dedicated enlisted force which has developed over the years.
If I would fault anything in this book, it is the simplistic view that America lost the war in Viet Nam because of the
impossible "rules of engagement" (ROE) that President Johnson and especially his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
placed on the war fighters. Boyne holds the opinion, shared by many military leaders, that America could have won that
war if the generals who understood the principles of war were allowed to apply unrestricted power against the enemy. He
hammers this position home with what the coalition Air Forces accomplished against Iraq in Desert Storm. The danger of
this logic is that it implies that wars are always won by the side that has the greater ability to destroy its opponents. In Viet
Nam, it was not the weapons but the will of the opposing governments, which determined who held the field. In the future,
if rogue nations and non-state organizations recognize that they cannot challenge the USAF in the air, they will choose
other ways to attack America. A rental truck full of fertilizer driven by a determined individual can destroy and kill just as
well as a billion dollar aircraft.
The book has several excellent appendices including an exhaustive day to day chronology of the most important events of
the entire period of air power in America. It also lists the senior leaders; officer, enlisted, and civilian for the first 50 years.
Lee P. Rodgers, Brig Gen (Sel) USAF
[The views expressed by the author of this review are not necessarily the views of the government of the United States nor
of the US Air Force and should not be construed as such.]
Urban, Mark. UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
Commencing his book with the appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet Leader and (as a consequence) as intelligence
concern, Mark Urban comments in the preface of his UK Eyes Alpha that "it might be argued that now is too early to look
at such recent events," (p. viii) and the inevitable conclusion reading his book is that this is almost certainly true. That
Urban's volume follows so closely on the heels of current events is not helped by his frustrating practice (for an academic)
of citing assorted published sources, but without either detailed citations or a bibliography. Nonetheless, the volume is,
within these limits, very thoroughly researched. Urban's journalistic reliance on interviews with former officials and
politicians has been considerably fortified through his use of political and intelligence memoirs as well as government
publications. If the book has any fundamental drawback, it is that even with a wealth of fascinating data concerning the
strengths and weaknesses of the British intelligence system, Urban still resorts to speculation and insinuation in order to
reintroduce the traditional left-wing concerns about accountability and the ever-contentious transAtlantic "Special
Relationship." Such a strategy of last resort is unnecessary; there is enough critical and sometimes even damning
information in his raw data to warrant very serious interest, but it is of a fundamentally different order from that to which
the politically committed critics of intelligence are accustomed.
Urban starts out promisingly enough, asking what are essentially the classical questions of intelligence studies and
American-influenced intelligence "theory":
How good is British intelligence? What kind of return do ministers and officials get for the hundreds of millions of pounds
spent on espionage each year? How does this secret establishment find direction and purpose in an age when old certainties
have evaporated? (p. vii)
As far as this goes, Urban is asking all the right questions, and gets some interesting and compelling answers. Just as
Michael Herman has noted in his Intelligence Power in Peace and War, one of the potential drawbacks of a
consensus-based, all-source analysis system is so-called "group think." This manifests itself in the Joint Intelligence
Community (JIC) through both the emergence of certain unquestioned orthodoxies, and also a tendency for its evaluations
to reflect the lowest common denominator of participants' opinions. However, where Herman provides a general warning
from insider experience, Urban quotes ministerial and Whitehall consumers in support of this tendency (or at least its
perceived occurrence), and also provides, and quotes former ministers (including the ill starred David Mellor) about their
dissatisfaction with the blandness of JIC reports, and their dependency on a consensus on a "lowest common denominator."
Moreover, Urban's portrayal of such influential figures as Margaret Thatcher and one-time JIC Chairman Sir Percy
Cradock also suggests how strong and strongly committed personalities can impose an orthodoxy on JIC assessments
through the face-to-face impact of small-group dynamics.
For the most part, Urban's survey of British intelligence operations and the assessment process during the 1980s and early
'90s is informative, and in many respects presents something of a counterpoint to the image of the British agencies at the
end of the Cold War by James Adams (in his The New Spies, London: Hutchinson, 1994). Adams develops a picture of a
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) under Sir Colin McColl vigorously embracing the new and revising its practices and
organization to meet the emerging intelligence needs of the post-Cold War era. Urban's SIS on the cusp of the new world
(dis)order is one almost obsessed with "screwing" (p. 224) the Soviet/Russian agencies once and for all, determined to
settle such old scores as Philby and Blake decades after the fact. Urban's accounts of the Security Service and GCHQ's
(Government Communications Headquarters) similarly provide a sense of the mixed bag of successes and failures
experienced by those agencies, although his discussion of GCHQ is far less detailed than that on MI5.
Although Urban's account involves a limited retelling of stories, such as Oleg Gordievsky, or the defection of biological
warfare scientist Vladimir Pasechnik, he adds such additional matters as the differences between British and American
estimates of Soviet chemical warfare capabilities, and, in the cold light of post-Cold War hindsight, the apparent
inaccuracy of both. Urban also provides a reasonably convincing picture of the kinds of quid pro quo that exist between the
British and Americans in their so-called "Special Relationship." He recounts how British contributions to the costs of US
space-based SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) and overhead reconnaissance and surveillance systems have secured the British
some limited ability to "task" these assets. He also compares these resources favorably with the developing European
satellite intelligence capability (SPOT and HELIOS), and with the vast, futile expenditure on Britain's stillborn,
independent ZIRCON satellite program. Urban also provides an account of British intelligence strengths and weaknesses
during the Gulf War, including the debatable decisions over what was and was not made available to British and allied
commanders in the field.
Finally, Urban provides a survey of post-Cold War intelligence requirements, and some of the structural changes to the
British system to cope with those changes. Here Urban makes some especially interesting observations, particularly about
the future of SIGINT. He repeats and elaborates upon a number of the better known changes, such as MI5's new emphasis
on counter-terrorism, and SIS' new geographical priorities and its Controller, Global and Functional (dealing with
"motherhood" issues such as counter-proliferation and transnational crime). Perhaps one of Urban's interesting
contributions here is his discussion of the contemporary information technology and its implications for both intelligence
and security operations. For example, fibre-optics make line taps harder, and also make the very secure communications
through so-called "quantum key" ciphers a possibility. And then there is the question of readily available, inexpensive and
relatively strong encryption through the common desktop computer. UK Eyes Alpha raises very real questions about the
degree to which commercial strong encryption will make COMINT (Communications Intelligence) that much more
difficult, particularly where counter-terrorism and serious crime are concerned. In view of the recent successful attack on
the export version of the RSA encryption key, it may be possible that Urban is overestimating the problems presented by
cheap and cheery strong encryption. Nonetheless, Urban is asking the kinds of questions about intelligence and information
technology which need to be asked, and still remain imperfectly examined in the literature.
Despite Urban's wealth of raw material, he nonetheless seems to feel the need to resort to sloppy reasoning and speculation
in order to preserve the classical political concerns about control and accountability. For example, one of the items featured
in the 1989 Security Service Act absent from the earlier 1952 Maxwell-Fyffe Directive is the provision for the Security
Service to act in defence of Britain's "economic well-being." Of this new clause, Urban asserts that "people within the
Service did not have a precise idea of what the 'economic well-being' clause amounted to . . . one MI5 officer suggests that
the clause was put in 'just in case'." Urban's conclusion is that the clause's appearance is "an example of the Service's
tendency to seek maximum freedom in defining its role and preserving its establishment." (p. 53) It would, however, seem
rather unlikely for the Security Service's officials to have agitated legislators for the inclusion in the 1989 Act of an item
those officials did not themselves understand. Rather, the clause's appearance would seem more likely to represent a
perceived potential need on the part of the Service's consumers in Downing Street and Whitehall, particularly in view of
much the same clause appearing four years before in the 1985 Interception of Communications Act and five years later in
the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. Much the same might be said about the numerous occasions in which, deprived of any
real facts to work from, Urban resorts to speculation and insinuation. Did MI5 and the National Security Agency (NSA)
bug the communications rooms of foreign embassies in Britain during the 1980s, as had the NSA and Australia's ASIO?
Urban does not know, but remarks that "it would be surprising if the US eavesdropping agency did not exploit its
relationship with the UK to mount such operations in London." (p. 244) The Seabed Operations Vessel HMS Challenger
had among its tasks the protection of British undersea communication lines from Soviet taps (similar to the American IVY
BELLS operation against the USSR). But did it mount such taps itself? Urban does not know, "but a question remains . . .."
(p. 247) And, of course, such occasions are the sort of opportunity to adopt the pejorative language of "Britain's spies"
rather than intelligence officers, services or community, or "eavesdropping" rather than SIGINT. For the most part,
however, Urban's outbursts of guesswork and suggestion are more tactfully embedded in the larger narrative, but that
makes them more difficult to locate and isolate from Urban's more valuable, factual information.
For the most part, then, Urban's UK Eyes Alpha is a valuable contribution to the field, although occasionally one has to
read somewhat carefully. The book does a thorough job of examining the British intelligence system over the second half
of the 1980s and the early 1990s, despite the limitations of the volume and kind of data available. The only real drawback
is Urban's apparent need to gild the critical lily, entirely unnecessary given the very real range of British intelligence
strengths and weaknesses that emerge from his factual narrative.
Philip H.J. Davies
Stansfield School of Business, Singapore
Smith, M.L.R., Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement. London
and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Most of those involved in negotiating or supporting Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement were replete with rhetoric
of "historic days" and "new beginnings." Momentum toward this "new" beginning has continued with the election of the
Assembly, the establishment of an international commission on policing and the promulgation of legislation to allow early
release of prisoners. Given all these "history making" events, one might expect a book that ends essentially in 1992 to have
limited contemporary value. However, that is not the case here. The questions raised by this book remain both unanswered
and central to the future of Northern Ireland.
This is a slightly updated version of a well-received hardback that first appeared in 1995. The author claims that the book's
distinctive feature is its "strategic" approach rather than its source material or, one might add, its conclusions. This strategic
approach is defined as simply tracing "the line of thinking of a particular political entity in order to comprehend how it
proposes to achieve its objectives; and also to look at the ideological assumptions and values that underlie that entity's
thinking and how this informs the way it formulates its strategy." (p. 4) This also defines the book's chronological
framework.
The first chapter is an excellent tour of the assumptions and analyses that have guided republican thinking since 1798. By
the time of the failed 1916 Easter rebellion, the republican movement was essentially a conspiratorial elite convinced of
the invincibility of its own colonial analysis of Ireland and that it was the vanguard of the Irish nation. It also believed in
the necessity for physical force regardless of public support. This led to violence being viewed as an end rather than a
means. Challenges to this view, such as those by Collins, de Valera or the 1960s radicals, ultimately produced splits in the
republican movement - something that the present leadership continues to fear.
But according to Smith, dedication to physical force has cost the republican movement far more than cohesion. It meant
that the movement lacked the political and analytical sophistication to take advantage of any short-term tactical advantage,
such as the 1972 fall of Stormont. The focus on physical force also made it easier for the movement's enemies to keep it
isolated, and it was largely fear of isolation that led to a republican review of strategy in 1977.
However, while this review of strategy produced a more sophisticated approach, including electoral politics, it did not
mean any down-grading of physical force, as Smith makes clear in Chapter 7. But by the end of the 1980s, a series of
military "mistakes" and heavy losses left the military instrument looking uncontrolled and counter-productive. So began
Sinn Fein's long march toward greater involvement in constitutional politics beginning with the Hume-Adams talks and
culminating in Sinn Fein's creditable performance in the Assembly elections and the possibility of a cabinet position for
Gerry Adams.
While this latter event happened after the publication of Smith's book, the questions he raises remain pertinent. Is the
current ceasefire permanent and does the political leadership have control of the military instrument? But perhaps most
importantly, we are still to be convinced that the desire to advance republican goals is now at a higher premium than the
desire to preserve a distinct ideo-military entity. Like Smith, this reviewer has reservations.
Overall, this is a work that is well deserving of a place on the bookshelves of researchers on Northern Ireland. Teachers of
courses on limited or irregular warfare will also find it a useful addition to their reading lists.
Joanne Wright
University of Ulster
Davis, James Kirkpatrick. Assault on the Left: the FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1997.
This is another rendition of a now-familiar story of how in the late 1960s the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
undertook to surveil, penetrate, and disrupt the American "New Left." James Davis, the president of an advertising agency
in Kansas City, has made a specialty of writing about the FBI and domestic security operations, and in this volume he is
able to quote extensively from internal Bureau documents in order to lend vividness to his narrative.
The original FBI Counterintelligence Program or (COINTELPRO) was directed against the Communist Party of the United
States. It began in May 1956 and, relying on massive infiltration and sowing of discord within the ranks of the party, it
"devastated what was left of the CPUSA." By 1971, party membership had declined from 22,000 to about 3,000, "a
considerable number of these undercover FBI informants." The next such operation, COINTELPRO-SWP, was aimed at
the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party. This was a smaller disruption effort against an already marginalized communist
group and it had inconclusive results. In September 1964, COINTELPRO - White Hate Groups was launched. Targeting the
Ku Klux Klan and other violence-prone far rights groups, such as the American Nazi Party and the National States Rights
Party, this was spectacularly successful and decimated the Klan. But the next program, initiated in the summer of 1967
(COINTELPRO - Black Hate Groups) while aimed primarily at the Black Panther Party, was less well-focused and less
successful.
COINTELPRO - New Left, the subject of this book, was the last of the sustained disruption operations. It was begun on 28
October 1968 and lasted until 27 April 1971. It was terminated by Director J. Edgar Hoover after stolen FBI files were
released to the press disclosing the program's existence. During the yeras of its existence 381 COINTELPRO - New Left
proposals for action were submitted by field offices to Bureau headquarters. As Davis reports "[o]f this total, 285 actions
were implemented with documented results obtained in seventy-seven actions."
There were a number of wiretaps of New Left Groups (arguably legal at the time), there were informants cultivated and
run by the Bureau within the antiwar movement (legal as long as the "asset" did not function as an agent provocateur), and
there may have been some warrantless physical searches or "black bag jobs" (which were certainly illegal). But the bulk of
the "actions" undertaken to "destabilize" New Left targets were letters from "a friend" or "a concerned citizen" to parents,
employers, school administrators and so on, informing them about the activities of children, employees or faculty. In
addition, FBI field offices engaged in a kind of anti-radical press agentry, plying friendly media with copies of anti-radical
news stories and articles. Finally, phoney letters intended to create discord within target groups were more broadly
distributed. In February 1967, for instance, a thousand copies of a letter were distributed to those attending a National
Council meeting of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Austin, Texas. "Brothers and Sisters," it began, "[I]f you
want to know where the FBI is at in the SDS, you need not look any further than the nearest PL." This referred to members
of the Progressive Labor Party, a fiery little sect that had separated from the CPUSA and was active in a number of New
Left causes. The letter went on to name a number of persons with PL and formally CP backgrounds who were alleged to be
longtime FBI informants, migrating from one radical organization to another at the behest of "the feds."
While such disruption tactics may not rank high on a list of the "hundred dirtiest tricks of the world's secret police forces,"
they were deeply shocking in the American context. Not only was COINTELPRO - New Left a failure (the anti-war
movement dissipated on its own as the Vietnam War ran down to its disgraceful conclusion), it has been universally
regarded, ever since its full "ventilation" by Church Committee in the mid 1970s, as a national disgrace. But that said, it is
disappointing that Davis, writing now from the perspective of a quarter century after the fact, settles for a simplistic
"good-kids-bad-cops" treatment of his subject. Most of the New Left was simply a political protest movement, but
embedded in it were genuinely terrorist elements. And because the bombers and the bank robbers and the cop killers
operated across state lines, the American people had every reason to expect that the premier national law enforcement
agency would be on the case. Today we should be asking what it is we can learn from the unhappy history of the 1960s and
1970s about how internal security operations should be conducted in a liberal society.
Here are a few issues that the author might have reflected upon with profit. First, in his closing pages Davis notes with
approval the adoption on 5 April 1976 of Attorney General Edward Levi's famous guidelines for domestic intelligence
investigations, but he fails to mention that these quickly proved inadequate. They were revised in 1984 to allow some
greater investigative flexibility, and in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing there was a lively debate over whether they
should be revised again. The problem is what investigative techniques should be allowed on the basis of what sort of
information? The more effective techniques (physical surveillance, cultivation on informants, and so on) are also the more
intrusive. There is reluctance to authorize them unless the information suggesting the likelihood of terrorist activity is quite
good. Yet it is often difficult either to confirm or invalidate thin but alarming information (to see whether it is "good" or
not), without resorting to intrusive techniques. If you don't know you shouldn't look, but unless you look how can you
know?
Second, Davis notes and applauds Director Clarence Kelley's 1976 decision to transfer all domestic security operations
from the Bureau's Intelligence Division to the General Investigative Division. The superficially appealing idea underlying
this move was that politically motivated crime should be treated like ordinary crime, and that leaving it in the Intelligence
Division (the primary responsibility of which is coping with foreign espionage within the United States) would invite the
use against purely domestic targets of the sorts of prolonged, free-wheeling information gathering and retention efforts
appropriate against foreign intelligence operations. But how much sense does this really make in a "world without
borders?" The World Trade Center bombing demonstrates how where politically motivated crime is concerned, the line
between "foreign" and "domestic" can quickly become blurred. And when the counter-intelligence function is itself already
divided (by the terms of the National Security Act of 1947) between the Central Intelligence Agency, with overseas
responsibility, and the FBI, with internal responsibility, it may be questioned whether a further division of authority within
the Bureau makes sense. It does not take much of a crystal ball to foresee that many future investigations will involve three
different "shops" - with all the problems of interface and coordination that entails.
Third, beyond the technical issues of how guidelines should be drawn and bureaucratic responsibility apportioned, there is
a fundamental practical problem at the heart of all the debates over the proper scope of "domestic intelligence" operations,
and Davis seems unaware of its difficulty. Edward Levi, issuing his guidelines in 1976, declared that "government
monitoring of individuals and groups because they hold unpopular or controversial political views is intolerable in our
society." No one disagrees, but does the situation change when the political rhetoric begins to evoke the necessity or
desirability of illegal means or even violence to advance the cause? Is this different from simply "controversial" or
"unpopular" speech? As one defensive FBI veteran once put it, "if we had people going around talking about the desirability
of hijacking interstate shipments we would want to keep an eye on them too." This is where the going gets hard. Ought
"monitoring" be undertaken simply on the basis of words that endorse violence? Or must there be some additional,
nonverbal indication that the utterances should be taken seriously? And if there should be, must this involve actual
lawbreaking?
In all the years of hand wringing we have had over the COINTELPROS, it is interesting that nobody has had much bad to
say about COINTELPRO - White Hate Groups. In part this may reflect the overwhelming left-wing bias of American
academic commentators - what happens to groups on the right simply worries them less than what happens to groups of the
left. But it may also reflect the commonsensical judgement that the Klan and other white supremacist outfits really had it
coming. There was a significant track record of violence in this case, and when, after the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner
murders in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, the FBI (in the words of one senior Bureau official) set out to "bust the balls
of the Ku Klux Klan," even the most ardent civil libertarians might have thought "about time!"
The hard problems of domestic security operations - of dealing with politically motivated lawbreaking - will not yield to
bromides about government not picking on people because of their politics. Davis, with his intimate knowledge of the
record of FBI abuses back in the bad old days, might have offered us more help in trying to think about the future.
Richard E. Morgan
Bowdoin College
Schom, Alan. Napoleon Bonaparte. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
Undertaking a manageable biography of Napoleon Bonaparte is a daunting venture whether in an academic context or in a
popular one. Alan Schom has proven his daring and has succeeded in providing both a sound and readable overview of one
of the colossal figures of European history. Only Charlemagne and Adolph Hitler have refashioned Europe as profoundly
and one must look to Cyrus, Alexander, Augustus, Timur, Shih Huangdi and Genghiz Khan for comparable figures from
other periods and cultures. Both Napoleon and Schom are conscious of the role that the general, First Consul, and Emperor
played, for good and ill, on the European stage. The challenge lies in evaluating that role and there, naturally enough,
Bonaparte is the more certain of the benefits of his career for both France and Europe.
Schom is no Bonapartist. His sensibility is of the twentieth rather than the early nineteenth century with its burden of la
gloire and its revolutionary elan. The heroism and the heroics of the military profession are continually weighed against the
waste, both economic and human, of the repeated bloody campaigns which culminated in the great defeat of 1815. He sees
the corpses, the burned villages, the unplanted fields, and the horrors of what poor attempts were made to treat those
wounded by the prototypes of mechanized warfare. He also sees Bonaparte's lack of adequate scouting and preparation and
his unreasoning assumption that France was an inexhaustible reservoir of money and manpower to simply be called up
when needed. Here is an author whose judgments are those of a philosophe or of an economic analyst, a realist on the same
wave length as Fouche and Talleyrand. From this point of view, the Napoleonic phenomenon can only be seen as a product
of spin management and a triumph of public relations.
Given these assumptions, the Bonaparte of this biography emerges as far more a political than a military genius. His
control and manipulation of information sources and official documents becomes, even prior to 18 Brumaire, a major
factor in his advancement and in the mythology of the Empire culminating in his Memoires. First manifest in the
disastrously conceived and implemented Egyptian campaign which was transformed from a military debacle into a
romantic adventure to be finally concretized into an exotic decor, his ability to mould reality to his own advantage
eventually evolved into the delusionary isolation of the last years of his reign and the cloud-castles of Saint Helena. The
famous Bonaparte "luck" is for Schom founded on an extraordinary ability to deceive and manipulate not only the
individuals around him, but an entire nation.
But there were the victories. From Toulon to Borodino war was not only an extension of diplomacy but, in many instances,
a substitute for it. The use of firepower and the resources of the levee en masse, resources fashioned respectively by the
ancien regime and the Revolution, were applied to more traditional forces by an officer corps trained, as was Bonaparte
himself, under the monarchy but reordered by the revolutionary ideals of promotion on the basis of merit. Schom's
excellent thumbnail sketches of Bonaparte's chief associates and enemies include those of his marshalls. One would be
hard put to assemble a more diverse and quarrelsome batch of subordinates who are seen by the author as ranging from
incompetent to downright treacherous. Far from being a team of loyal supporters, a picture of mutual detestation and
competition based on envy emerges. There is also a distinct tendency to disobey orders and to refuse to aid each other or to
run amuck as witness Ney's suicidal cavalry charges at Waterloo. Whatever the moral of the story, one is left with being
unable to attribute Bonaparte's military successes to anyone other than himself. The battles are described in some detail and
appropriate maps are included at easily referred to locations in the text.
As with most biography, it is difficult to draw boundaries between the subject's personal life and official role. The focus
here is on Bonaparte himself and his personality. It strives to bring him down to earth in spite of his own efforts to remain
an icon. The viewpoint is that of his opponents. His foibles are closely scrutinized and his miscalculations pointed up. His
increasing isolation from everyone after his coronation and his remarriage calls to mind the chilling description of him by
Mme. de Stael. Here is a man of the eighteenth century out of his context. His inability to deal with the "grass roots'
resistance in Spain or with the Tsar Alexander's refusal to acknowledge defeat via negotiations not only reflects a personal
failure but a failure of his world view, that of a man following a "proved" plan of action which has always worked but
which for some reason has now betrayed him. Military successes should always be followed by diplomatic negotiations
confirming one's advantage. The Hundred Days were a last attempt to make the magic formula work.
Napoleon Bonaparte's career is replete with conflict. Not only does it transcend his personal life in its military, economic,
political and diplomatic manifestations, but it is part and parcel of it in his relationships with his family and associates. The
use of memoirs throughout this book is most effective. They impart a great deal of warmth and liveliness to the narrative
which is well larded with quotations and vignettes. They must, of course, be treated with some care as each of them has a
point of view; little Saint Helena narratives as it were. Virtually everyone seems to have been "scribbling away" often, of
course, to justify their actions or to even a score or two. We must nevertheless be grateful to them for their insights and to
Alan Schom for gleaning these many passages from them and arranging them so fetchingly in the context he has
constructed for them.
R. Thomas McDonald
Fairleigh Dickinson University
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