The Death of Robert McNamara

Eoin Purcell

Some years ago now a friend lent me his copy of Fog Of War, which was at once a brilliant and yet incredibly intriguing documentary featuring Robert McNamara. I had always wondered about The Vietnam War, feeling that it was deeply misunderstood at a public level and that although the underlying policy that motivated it (containment) was valid, the way the policy was being pursued (through warfare) was undermining the policy and the reputation of the United States.

Fog Of War only offered more questions and made the story even more complex. Errol Morris, the director of that movie has a thoughtful piece on McNamara over on the New York Time’s website. One section that struck me was this:

His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There’s ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong. Why did he remain silent until the 1990s, when “In Retrospect” was published? That is something that people will probably never forgive him for. But he had an implacable sense of rectitude about what was permissible and what was not. In his mind, he probably remained secretary of defense until the day he died.

I think what I like about it us the sense that there is no black & white in cases like this.

For more thoughts and coverage of McNamara, read this or this or this.

In Dublin, taking it easy,
Eoin

Filed under: Google Book Search, History, Strategy, United States of America, War

I love new discoveries: New Books In History

Eoin Purcell

Something for the long weekend
If you have spotted a new blog widget at the side there linking out to this site then let me explain. I stumbled across the site last week and it offers the most incredible array of posts and podcast on history stretching back to January 2008.

It is good, quality material well worth listening to and reading. There is a facebook group that I’d encourage you to join and the creator of the site, Marshall Poe, has quite a bit to say on other topics too!

Go Read & Listen!
Eoin

Filed under: History, Reference , Books, history podcasts, podcasts

Quick Links for the day

Eoin Purcell

There is a great history timeline on BBC History site. It is well worth visiting and spending some time on. The internal links are excellent and the extra material is smashing!

Coming Anarchy has a fascinating post about the strange borders that make up the modern Malaysia. The comments offer some interesting bits too.

For those of us, slightly obsessed with the US Civil War, I offer A Civil War Blog and this fine example of the authors posts, a list of his top ten Civil War Blogs.

Filed under: Uncategorized , BBC History, Civil War, colonialism, fighting, History, malysia, maps, migration, UK History, USA

The Revenege of Geography

Eoin Purcell

Robert Kaplan Strikes Again
Kaplan writes an elegant and persuasive article about how Geography affects the world! In many ways it is a plea for a realist view of the world:

Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

What I like about the piece is threefold
Firstly I enjoy his references to philosophers and historians. The philosophers are Isaiah Berlin and Thomas Hobbes, both with interesting and illuminating things to offer reader. And Google Books has plenty items in Full View for both though frustratingly in the case of Hobbes, not a Leviathan available for extract so instead you get a rather nice but non-downloadable Forgotten books edition! Which seems crazy when the base text is well out of copyright!

His historical references are numerous but Mahan and Braudel stand out! One eye opener was Nicholas Spykman (for more on his truly intriguing views here is a very nice overview) of whom I had never heard but of whom Kaplan say:

Similarly, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman saw the seaboards of the Indian and Pacific oceans as the keys to dominance in Eurasia and the natural means to check the land power of Russia. Before he died in 1943, while the United States was fighting Japan, Spykman predicted the rise of China and the consequent need for the United States to defend Japan. And even as the United States was fighting to liberate Europe, Spykman warned that the postwar emergence of an integrated European power would eventually become inconvenient for the United States. Such is the foresight of geographical determinism.

For another thing
Secondly I like his concept of:

geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And maybe I feel that way because I wish to justify my recent (and fabulously cheap) purchase of Keith Johnston’s A Sketch of Historical Geography which is a truly excellent text worth owning and you can read in the lovely Open Library edition here, but I think there is something to what Kaplan says. Something that informs the rest of the piece.

And finally
I like his closing exhorting for us all to:

learn to think like Victorians. That is what must guide and inform our newly rediscovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists, thereby merging the analogies of Vietnam and Munich. Embracing the dictates and limitations of geography will be especially hard for Americans, who like to think that no constraint, natural or otherwise, applies to them. But denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography.

I very much enjoy Kaplan but sometimes I’m left with as many questions as answers with him, not that that is a bad thing!
Eoin

Filed under: Africa, British, Classic Books, Economics, Empire, Europe, Free Books, Geography, Google Book Search, History, Robert Kaplan, Russia, Russian, Society, Strategy, United States of America, War , Naval Strategy, Paul Kennedy, Sir Halford J. Mackinder

Pirates: not quite the swahsbuckling heroes our movies paint them

Sad Tidings From The East
I read two op-ed pieces today about Pirates and the internet news is full of stories too. One of the pieces is by Robert D. Kaplan in the New York Times and hits the hot button pretty much on the head:

The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.

So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.

The much shorter and less interesting piece in the Washington Post does at least suggest that:

Bringing partner countries into the fight would ease the burden on major military powers, including the United States. It’s not easy to sustain a major warship, especially in hostile waters. “Where do you get gas? Where do you buy fresh fruit?” Kraska asked. “You can only keep a single ship at sea for so long.”

More thoughts on it
It would be worthwhile putting the piracy into some perspective and in that regard the current issue of Foreign Affairs has an interesting article by the same Robert D. Kaplan that discusses naval rivalry in the Indian Ocean:

The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Although the Arabs and the Persians are known to Westerners primarily as desert peoples, they have also been great seafarers. In the Middle Ages, they sailed from Arabia to China; proselytizing along the way, they spread their faith through sea-based commerce. Today, the western reaches of the Indian Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan — constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims — the legacy of those medieval conversions — live along the Indian Ocean’s eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.

And a nice Q&A with him, here.

The sad truth of these events is that eventually, the pirates will be defeated (as I wrote this, I got news of this story, detailing the freeing of their current captive and the killing of three of their number). They will eventually overstep the mark and a force will be roused to clear them from the waters they inhabit. That may be sooner than we think. Of copurse even swift action and a scouring of the sea, will not resolve the anarchy on land that allows them to operate, so there may be pirates for some time to come!

Eoin

** UPDATE **
It is worth reading these posts over on Coming Anarchy Stop Calling Them Pirates and Kaplan’s Latest for more thoughts.
They also point to Political Warfare and Harpers. If you want some background try International Crisis Group of the BBC. The ICG links to a great article from the International Herald Tribune which leads of with:

Strange how an African country can be moving from prolonged chaos to violent collapse and no one in the world notices until a couple of European boats get seized by armed gunmen.

War-ravaged Somalia is in the worst shape it has been in for years – which, for this devastated country that has not had a proper government for nearly a generation, is really saying something.

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Empire, History, Pirates, United States of America, War

A day for fighting

Eoin Purcell

Strange concurrence
Looking over the events for the day I was struck by the prevalence of violent events that happened today> I thought a flavour of them might serve to show what I mean:

The Battle of Taierzhuang was in full flow in 1938. This battle although far from a critical turning point in the war, provided a much needed victory for the Chinese and helped galvanize Chinese morale. I find these battles so interesting, they turn the course of events, or they don’t but might have, or even more critically, they set the stage for future events.

The Crimean War: Either today or tomorrow, depending on where you look, Britain and France declared war on Russia. You’ll find and interesting time line for that war here on the Victorian Web. Link many wars, it is remembered principally for incidentals, like the Charge of The Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale rather than the real reason, the outcomes or the conflict itself. (PS: Mostly I just find the above video funny)

Then there is the president-to-be, Andrew Jackson led Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Frankly I’ve thought for a while that Jackson was a man who deserved attention and have been interested in the biography that has been selling in large numbers in the US. Of course he was not without his failings including a somewhat uncompromising attitude towards the Native American peoples. The Video below shows how he continued that policy when he became president.

The last event that struck me was the Battle of Komandorski Islands in the North Pacific in 1943. I had never even heard of ths engagement but the Wikipedia Article is fascinating:

Because of the remote location of the battle and chance encounter on open ocean, neither fleet had air or submarine assistance, making this the only engagement exclusively between surface ships in the Pacific Theatre, and the last pure gunnery duel between major combatants in American naval history.

All told, quite a day for the violence!
Eoin

Filed under: Europe, France, Google Book Search, North America, United States of America, WWII, War, Wikipedia

An unknown event: The Irish Convention

Eoin Purcell

What you learn
Reading history books is pretty impressive. For instance, yesterday as we worked through some issues in an upcoming Mercier title, The Donegal Awakening, I stumbled across a reference to the Irish Convention, a body I had not known about:

The new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George accepted Redmond’s suggestion for an Irish Convention to resolve the problem of Home Rule and to draft a constitution for Ireland within the British Empire. The convention met in July 1917 but had made little headway when Redmond died suddenly on 6 March 1918. Later that year, in the general election of December, Redmond’s party’s representation at Westminster collapsed, resulting in a Sinn Féin triumph.

*

In July 1917 an Irish Convention representing a broad spectrum of interests met in the vain hope that Irishmen might work out a political settlement satisfactory to all. Here the Anglo-Irish were represented and participated in an attempt to decide the destiny of their country.

*

So where can I read more?
Reading about it on the pages of wikipedia and UCC’s wonderful multi-text project I was intrigued and did some digging, discovering (on LibraryThing) that there is only one text published on the Convention. That is R.B. McDowell’s The Irish Convention 1917-18.

So unless you want to dig into the bowels of Abebook and pay for postage as well as the book, you can’t. Though maybe the libraries …

Overall this little tale just serves to remind us how the real story of our history is yet to be properly told and popularly.
Eoin

Filed under: British, Classic Books, Empire, Europe, History, Ireland, Politics, Reference , Irish History, Irish Nationalism, The Irish Convention

John Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman

Eoin Purcell

From Flickr user dvdbramhall

Image owned by dvdbramhall, cc

Battles & Such
Some years ago I read a fascinating biography of John Hawkwood an English condottiero (mercenary) in 14th century Italy. His story was a fascinating one. It was called John Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman and it was written by Frances Stonor Saunders. I’d encourage anyone interested in the period of Italian history to read the book. It will help you get under the skin of a very, very complicated society.

The reason I raise this today is that I stumbled across an interesting note about today’s date on Wikipedia:

1387 – Battle of Castagnaro: English condottiero Sir John Hawkwood leads Padova to victory in a factional clash with Verona.

A little digging around the world of online material yields some interesting results. There is the preview version of John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-century Italy by William Caferro. The book page on Google Books is full of information and really a very rich resource worth visiting. It certainly beats the pants off the book page for Frances Stonor Saunders’ book.

Worth reading more on Hawkwood I suggest, if only as a way to understand what was a very confusing period.
Eoin

Filed under: Google Book Search, History, Italy, Reference, Sir John Hawkwood, Society

Arthur Griffith: The Free State’s Lost Leader

Eoin Purcell

Arthur Griffith arriving at Earlsfort Terrace. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

**
Ourselves Alone
Whereas my last post on Irish history discussed the 90th Anniversary of the first Dáil, and the post previous to that talked about WT Cosgrave, this post deals with a man whose life and views impacted both the career of Cosgrave and the very formation of the Dáil; Arthur Griffith.

In many ways Griffith’s ideas about how freedom might be best achieved for Ireland had a subtle and under-appreciated impact on Irish affairs.

His promotion of passive resistance and the non-recognition* of British imperial instruments while not directly responsible for it, was a powerful force in shaping the policies that led to the first Dáil, solidifying the democratic mandate of the independence movement and creating a moral legitimacy that became difficult to overcome and which was important in swaying public opinion both domestically and internationally.

By creating that legitimacy (which worked on both national electorate and international opinion levels) the Dáil was better placed to act as a national government and to negotiate with the British Cabinet when the opportunity arose. It also gave the republican courts their legitimacy and reinforced the sovereignty of the democratically elected chamber over the military men.

That primacy of politics over military prowess was crucial in saving Ireland from the threat of military dictatorship. The Free State government was briefly threatened by the ascent of Collins, whose position in the weeks before he died was at the very least questionable in democratic terms.

But it was also threatened by the militaristic trend in teh anti-treaty forces and again after the cvil war by the Free State Army as it struggled to come to terms with its relegated position within a democratic state.

But the Free State government had the legitimacy of democratic process, established since 1919 and reinforced by three elections since to back up their position. In many ways, that was exactly what kept the country democratic, that and the steadying hand of WT Cosgrave as discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Some have suggested that Griffith’s contribution to Irish history has been ignored and I think this is to a degree true. His views do not chime with the founding myth of the Irish State, nor was his position on the treaty palatable to the Republican ethos of the Fianna Fail government hat came to power in 1932 and so effectively claimed the mantle of the state and shaped the founding myth in its created image.

Griffith warrants much more academic and popular attention and I suspect that he will benefit from it over the next few years as we approach the centenary of many critical events.

Campaigning? Maybe a little!
Eoin

* Which he did through his writings like: The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel For Ireland
** I found this picture on the wonderful UCC Multitext site, a fascinating project worth visiting.

Filed under: Austria, Austro-Hungarian, British, Civil War, Classic Books, Empire, Europe, History, Ireland, Reference, Revolution, War , 1916, Griffith, History, Sinn Fein

90th Anniversary of the first Dáil

Eoin Purcell

Two Historic items on this one day in Irish History
RTÉ have a very nice link to their archive for the 90th Anniversary of the first Dáil.

The rather smashing lecture by Kevin B. Nolan hits some of the great highlights of what Dáil Eireann always represented to me:

A return to democratic and passive means of advancing Irish freedom
It made use of the Imperial electoral machine that already existed
It created a moral force the like of which Britain was to find difficult to resist
It asserted a democratic program that lasted despite the trouble of the War of Independence and the Civil War.
It asserted the predominance of Civil over Military

It’s a more complex story though
Oddly enough I think that the lecture fails to tackle one of the core failings of the Dáil, the inability to resist the slide into War, a problem which was driven largely by non-Dáil actors like Dan Breen & Sean Treacy who 90 years ago today effectively started the War of Independence through their actions at Soloheadbeg.

It was precisely because that predominance over military was an assertion rather than a fact that this turn of events happened. Had the control of the IRA & IRB been complete and democratic, Soloheadbeg would not have happened, but the Dáil only really gained that real power in 1924 with the effective Army Mutiny of that March.

In other News
Seems a little less historic now that Barack Obama has been sworn in!

Filed under: British, Empire, Ireland, Revolution, War