The
Savage Wars of Peace:
Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
Max
Boot
Basic
Books, 428 pages
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It was an American philosopher — George Santayana — who uttered the famous maxim: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The irony in this fact, of course, is that Americans often view their ignorance of history as a virtue. The consequences of this "ahistorical" American mindset can be disastrous, both for the United States — and whatever countries happen to get in its way.
Thus, a book such as Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power might be welcomed as an antidote to America's almost-ritual abandonment of its own history. In his book, Boot excavates over 200 years of American military activity from the pit of ignorance into which it has been slung. The author bypasses the major conflicts (the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World Wars I and II), and instead explores the minor military conflicts and expeditions in which the United States has involved itself.
In fact, Boot's disinterment of characters long lost to the military textbooks - heroes and scoundrels, brilliant tacticians and rank incompetents - is among the most fascinating parts of The Savage Wars of Peace. Boot uses large amounts of narrative glue to link his wide-ranging compendium of minor conflicts - ranging from Cuba to the Mediterranean to Russia to China to the establishment of U.S. rule in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. The Savage Wars of Peace is, above all, an eminently readable book —even for those with little knowledge of military history.
Much of that readability is due to Boot's skill in conveying battles and diplomacy of the past with a succinct humor. Many of the anecdotes retold by Boot have a touch of comic savagery to them. Writing of the officers of the U.S. warship Philadelphia, captured by Tripolitan warships in 1803 and released by Pasha Yusuf two years later, Boot observes that "Of the Philadelphia's crew of 307, 296 were released; six had died during the captivity and five had gone 'Turk.' (When they heard of the crew's imminent release, four of the five Americans who has sworn fealty to Islam tried to switch back, but an irate Yusuf marched them away never to be seen again. The other Americans lodged no complaint."
Boot also excels in writing quick and illuminating character sketches. In describing Captain David Porter (who temporarily "annexed" the Marquesas Islands for the United States in 1813), the author writes:
"Tact had never been Porter's strong suit. Once, when he was a young midshipman, a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed lieutenant bawled him out for some petty infraction, and then slapped him to drive the point home. Porter responded by knocking down his senior with one punch. A few years later, a Baltimore tavernkeeper with an aversion to naval officers ordered Porter out of his establishment. Porter refused to leave until he had finished his drink. Enraged and drunk, the proprietor knocked him down and was preparing to deliver another blow when Porter drew his dirk (a small sword) and buried it in his assailant's chest, killing him on the spot. And then there was the time a drunken English sailor approached Porter's ship, anchored in Malta, and insulted the American flag. Porter had the sailor hauled aboard and flogged, almost setting off a war with Great Britain."
There are moments, however, when Boot's light touch betrays him, and is transformed into a flippant "Realpolitik." For instance, the author's discussion of the often-brutal methods used to "pacify" the Philippines leads Boot into the following digression:
"Although wars against guerillas tend to be particularly savage, atrocities are endemic to all wars, not just colonial ones. When men are thrust into kill-or-be killed circumstances, the constraints of civilization often slip off with shocking ease. There were, for instance, many instances of Allied troops killing Germans who tried to surrender in World Wars I and II. 'No soldier who fights until his enemy is at close small-arms range, in any war, has more than perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of being granted quarter,'writes a British military sociologist. 'If he stands up to surrender he risks being shot with the time-honored comment, "Too late, chum."' When perpetrated by the winning side in a popular war, such as World War II, such incidents are generally hushed up. They only become the focus of public debate when committed in the course of an unpopular conflict like the one in the Philippines, or later Vietnam. It is a mistake, however, to focus exclusively on misconduct by soldiers at the expense of the larger strategic picture."
Of course, Boot is writing specifically here about American perceptions of conflict. Yet, the approval that the author awards to the quotation of a "time-honored" refusal to honor what are now known as the "Geneva Conventions" - not to mention the "mistake" of placing misconduct under arms on the same stage as the "larger strategic picture" sounds suspiciously close to the rationalizations offered up by war criminals.
Alas, Boot's sentiments are all too commonplace in American life. Their wide acceptance in the United States may explain, in part, the vociferous U.S. opposition to a permanent International Criminal Court.
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Perhaps Boot's insistence on the "larger strategic picture" is due in part to the fierce public debate on the proper uses of the vast American military machine at a time when the United States is the world's only superpower. It is a debate that originated in the decade-long U.S. disaster in Vietnam, and it has profoundly impacted the conduct of U.S. warfare and foreign policy ever since. Far from altering this debate, the events of September 11, 2001 have only intensified it.
It may come as a surprise that a philosophical dispute over something as immense as U.S. military power is so easy to define. In short, the long and ruinous American war in Vietnam produced a generation of military thinkers who took the conflict's main lesson of that conflict as "the United States did not commit the resources or have the will to win." When these men ascended to the top ranks of the U.S. military, they were determined not to make the same mistakes.
The quintessential statement of this new American military has been dubbed the "Powell Doctrine" - and named after former Joint Chiefs of Staff head and present U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. It created a set of stringent criteria for the use of U.S. military forces, including the use of overwhelming force, strong support from American lawmakers, a set of "clearly defined political and military objectives, and an "exit strategy" that would extricate the U.S. from the conflict.
Boot enters into his discussion of the Powell Doctrine in the penultimate chapter of The Savage Wars of Peace. The timing is a bit disingenuous. In many ways, Boot's book is an attempt to refute the Powell Doctrine. Many of America's small wars, argues, were crucial in cementing the U.S. rise to power in the 20th Century. A number of them lacked the public support and the overwhelming force required by the Powell Doctrine. Boot also argues that a number of U.S. military incursions -
including early 20th Century U.S. landings in Latin America and the Phillippines - helped improve the welfare and living standards of those who were invaded.
The last argument is, of course, the traditional argument of the imperial power. Yet, Boot is careful to survey the darker and more capricious side of these "small wars" in The Savage Wars of Peace. The author observes that even idealistic U.S. Presidents such as Woodrow Wilson have been eager to use the might of the American military to — in that most wonderful turn of phrase — "export democracy." (He quotes Wilson telling a British envoy: "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!")
Boot's accounts of the small wars after the Powell Doctrine - Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo - are particularly critical of how U.S. military power has been used to "export democracy." The author observes that "In the Balkans, the U.S. was trying to play the role of imperialist on the cheap, an imperialist unwilling to act as forcefully and decisively as the U.S had in years gone by." In part, Boot lays the blame to a decided U.S. aversion to casualties. It's a trend, he argues, that has led both to the strict "force protection" rules in Bosnia and Kosovo that have kept American casualties in the Balkans astonishingly low. Yet, this same rule has hampered the effectiveness of both SFOR and IFOR to effectively help displaced citizens return to their homes or catch war criminals who continue to destabilize politics in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The war against terrorism is not a war to "export democracy" or stabilize regional politics. On current evidence in both the Middle East and in Pakistan and India, it is having quite the opposite effect. Yet many of the battles in this "global" war will of necessity be just the sort of "small wars" so exhaustively analyzed by Boot. For this reason alone, The Savage Wars of Peace is a useful book that should be read carefully by anyone interested in the historical context of U.S. military action.
In particular, for a U.S. president who declared that he wants America's Public Enemy Number one - Osama bin Laden - "dead or alive," The Savage Wars of Peace includes some interesting points. Boot observes that Woodrow Wilson met the raid on a U.S. border town in 1916 by the Mexican revolutionary bandit Pancho Villa with the determination to send a U.S. Army expedition "at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays."
The Army had a difficult time with the request, continues Boot:
"When the newly installed Secretary of war Newton Baker relayed this order to the army, the army chief of staff, grizzled old Major General Hugh Scott, asked him, 'Mr. Secretary, do you want the United States to make war on one man? Suppose he should get into a train and go to Guatemala, Yucatan, or South America; are you going to go after him?'
'Well, no, I am not.'
'That is not what you want, then,' General Scott explained. ' You want his band captured or destroyed.'
'Yes, that is what I really want.'"
The United States never got Villa - dead or alive - despite sending a force of over 10,000 men into Mexico to catch him. He was gunned down by his fellow Mexicans in 1923.
