Shankar Vedantam: Twisting Arms Isn't as Easy as Dropping Bomb
Whenever the United States goes to war, pro-war and antiwar advocates immediately reach for different history books. Hawks always equate the situation to a Hitler-Chamberlain standoff to show why hesitation can be fatal. Doves invariably pull the Vietnam War off the shelf to argue that plunging ahead can be foolhardy.
Two wars that the United States has launched against Iraq perfectly illustrate the problem with cherry-picking your history. Hawks and doves made their usual arguments before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Antiwar advocates who predicted that forcing Saddam Hussein to retreat from Kuwait would result in thousands of U.S. casualties were proved wrong by Operation Desert Storm. And the neoconservatives who warned that ignoring Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was like appeasing Hitler now have egg yolk dribbling down their faces.
The history book getting the most attention right now is about the 1954-1962 French colonial war in Algeria. Hundreds of thousands of people died in that conflict before Algerian guerrillas handed the French army a humiliating defeat. President Bush said he is reading Alistair Horne's account of the conflict, "A Savage War for Peace," to glean insights about the U.S. predicament in Iraq. Horne, a British historian, recently told PBS's Charlie Rose that he sees similarities and differences between the U.S. war in Iraq and the French war in Algeria -- and hopes his book will help Bush find a way to succeed in Iraq.
Political scientist Patricia Sullivan recently decided to take a different tack than the political pundits. Rather than look for a single war to provide insight, Sullivan decided to look at all post-World War II conflicts between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and weaker nations.
Her findings will probably surprise you -- and would make for sober reading at the White House: Although the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China were militarily superior to their opponents in every one of the 122 conflicts that Sullivan studied, these powerful countries failed to win an astonishing 39 percent of their wars against weaker opponents.
Other research backs up Sullivan: New York University professor of politics Bruce Bueno De Mesquita has shown that, in conflicts between unequal powers over the past 200 years, the weaker country has outdone its stronger foe 41 percent of the time.....
Read entire article at WaPo (column)
Two wars that the United States has launched against Iraq perfectly illustrate the problem with cherry-picking your history. Hawks and doves made their usual arguments before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Antiwar advocates who predicted that forcing Saddam Hussein to retreat from Kuwait would result in thousands of U.S. casualties were proved wrong by Operation Desert Storm. And the neoconservatives who warned that ignoring Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was like appeasing Hitler now have egg yolk dribbling down their faces.
The history book getting the most attention right now is about the 1954-1962 French colonial war in Algeria. Hundreds of thousands of people died in that conflict before Algerian guerrillas handed the French army a humiliating defeat. President Bush said he is reading Alistair Horne's account of the conflict, "A Savage War for Peace," to glean insights about the U.S. predicament in Iraq. Horne, a British historian, recently told PBS's Charlie Rose that he sees similarities and differences between the U.S. war in Iraq and the French war in Algeria -- and hopes his book will help Bush find a way to succeed in Iraq.
Political scientist Patricia Sullivan recently decided to take a different tack than the political pundits. Rather than look for a single war to provide insight, Sullivan decided to look at all post-World War II conflicts between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and weaker nations.
Her findings will probably surprise you -- and would make for sober reading at the White House: Although the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China were militarily superior to their opponents in every one of the 122 conflicts that Sullivan studied, these powerful countries failed to win an astonishing 39 percent of their wars against weaker opponents.
Other research backs up Sullivan: New York University professor of politics Bruce Bueno De Mesquita has shown that, in conflicts between unequal powers over the past 200 years, the weaker country has outdone its stronger foe 41 percent of the time.....