How Democracies Lose Small Wars, and: Democracies and Small Wars (review)

Two books, one a collection of essays, deal in different ways with conflict on the only scale we are likely to see in the foreseeable future, sharing an underlying theme that democracies are too squeamish to make effective (i.e., ruthless) use of force in colonial and post-colonial wars. Both books deserve wide readership by specialists, although Gil Merom's is hard going indeed. When history is hijacked by political science, one enters a realm of abstraction built on the curious notion that the past can be objectified. Merom postulates three factors that characterize the ability of democracies to prosecute small wars—counterinsurgencies, to be precise. The first is "instrumental dependence" referring to the degree to which the government requires the participation of the general public (e.g., conscripted manpower) to achieve its military aims. "Normative difference," is the gap between the morality of politicians and professional soldiers—resorting to increasingly harsh measures to achieve their ends—and that of society at large. Finally, "political relevance" measures the degree to which popular opinion is able to exert control over the government. Taken together these factors are not a bad frame of reference within which to examine the domestic side of the French war in Algeria, the first of Merom's two excellent case studies and by far the strongest part of the book. Unfortunately, the reader must slash his way through near-impenetrable thickets of political theory to reach an insightful and well-sourced narrative, which culminates succinctly: "[T]he criticism of the intellectuals and the press was at the root of the French disengagement from Algeria." Merom's second case study documents the rising tide of disillusion within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israeli body politic as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon wound its course. Nothing is said about the conflict on the sparsely populated eastern axis of advance, where the IDF was able to do what it did best. On the western axis leading into Beirut, however, the situation was different. The PLO and Shi'ite militias chose to insinuate themselves into the population; firepower and maneuver yielded meager results and a great deal of collateral damage. Phalangist militias seized an opportunity to settle scores behind the obliging Israeli shield, with tragic results at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The least-significant consequence was a two-decade hiatus in the political career of Ariel Sharon.

Merom has given us an instructive tutorial in how, in a democratic society, the exigencies of such warfare can create fissures within the military and undercut political support at home. We should credit his honesty in admitting that he chose the cases of France in Algeria and Israel in Lebanon because both were able to "maximize the potential for extrapolation (or generalization) and minimize the problem of confounding variables." Damn those variables! Political science finds its moment in the sun when historical facts slide neatly into place within the confines of theory, not something that happens every day. Merom has in the past been taken to task for "fitting data into a procrustean bed" of theory, and his brief analysis of the Vietnam War suffers accordingly. He correctly notes that from Hanoi's perspective three conditions had to be met to achieve success: withdrawal of American ground forces from the South, removal of American airpower, and curtailment of American support to the South Vietnamese army. He concludes, "these three conditions were eventually met because of developments inside the United States," which he attributes to the "pressure American society put on the state." Here Merom overcredits the antiwar movement and neglects to acknowledge that President Nixon did indeed...