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Jan. 5th, 2009 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerWell, I missed out on my 50 by a bit, even not accounting for my failure to list "Gentlemen of the Road" (a wonderful picaresque adventure novel set in ancient Khazaria) and re-readings of two of PG Wodehouse's 'Blandings' novels ("Something Fresh" and "summer Lightning"). Still less than 40! I'm putting it down to not having recorded some of my earlier conquests when I started up late in the year.
I won't have that excuse this year, as I'm starting right off, and with a corker of an old favourite to begin the year. "The Sheikh and the Dustbin" is the third and shortest of GM Fraser's books of short stories, mostly set in the 2/Gordons, in which he served as a junior officer directly after WWII. I love the stories because they are a wonderful picture of life in a time and milieu that I wish I could have been a part of, but appreciate at the least having a glimpse into. There's doubtless a little rose-coloured hindsight, but my impression is that Fraser was pretty even-handed in his depictions of his brother officers, NCOs, and ORs, as well as the various civilian characters who wander through the pages of his stories. His ability to weave a yarn was stunning--some of his stories live in my memory as if I had experienced the events myself. He was a remarkably multi-talented writer--adventure novels, serious war memoirs, these gems of short stories, straight history, movie scripts, all entertaining, most educational, very little of it forgettable.
Number 2 for 2009 is John Keegan's "The Iraq War". I found this very disappointing in some ways, as I have rabbited on about to some of you at length. JK is a populist, but very accomplished, military historian who has specialised in writing good books that explain aspects of military history to people who don't know much about either the military or history. This book, published in 2004, is partly history, and that part he does well. The survey of the history of Iraq and the bio of Saddam Hussein and his rise to power are quite well done.
The account of the conventional military operations is fairly well done, but it tends in places to be a bit...slanted by the author's personal biases. Bias is inevitable, but some writers handle it better than others. Keegan wants to depict the British and American forces in the best possible light, and the Iraqis in the worst, but his desire to do both sometime trips him up. It's hard to praise troops for mastery of the battlespace if their enemies are nonexistent or completely ineffectual. Keegan disingenuously sandwiches several descriptions of brave (if foolhardy) attacks by Iraqi regular army and Republican Guard troops in between repeated assertions that no Iraqi military contested the allied advance, that the only resistance forces were foreign fighters or Saddam fedayeen. He describes all participants in the war on the Iraqi side, no matter who they were or what their role, as 'terrorists', an unfortunate habit reminiscent of the Soviet (and more recently American) habit of describing any resistors of state power as "criminal elements" whether they are breaking any laws or not. He goes into great detail explaining how the British operation to capture Basra was based on Operation Motorman in Northern Ireland in 1972, then mentions briefly that the final operation was nothing like Motorman. In fact, Keegan goes to great length to assert that the British Army succeeded brilliantly in operating in urban areas in the Iraq War due to their long experience in counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland; in the face of the stark failure of the British to maintain even a shadow of control over the city of Basra in the period after the end of the conventional war, these assurances ring grievously hollow.
So, history, military analysis...the final portion of the book (and far too large a portion it is for what is supposed to be a military history) is Keegan's analysis of the international politics preceding the Iraq war, the purported 'casus belli', and the UK domestic politics involved in the decision to go to war and in the aftermath of the search for WMD. This last portion loses any semblance of balance, objectivity, or (IMO) rationality. Keegan emerges as a huge GW Bush fanboy and a man who, in a fit of enthusiasm (or perhaps just a fit!) compares Tony Blair to Winston Churchill! Keegan touts an imaginary theory of of international relations called Olympianism (a term apparently coined and--as far as I can tell--only otherwise used by a retired LSE professor and member of a conservative anti-EC think tank called the Bruges Group). Keegan pretends that this rather fanciful and goofy theory, which supposedly rejects both law and military force as a means to settle international differences in favour of unenforceable negotiated agreement, accounts for the lack of support for the US/UK drive to invade Iraq, rather than a difference of opinion over interpretation of the known facts, differing world views, and sheer calculated self-interest. In this and in other ways, Keegan demonstrates that his grasp of international relations and diplomacy is as weak as his familiarity with military history is strong. In doing so, he demonstrates the degree to which he is prepared to engage in either barefaced mendacity of willful self-deception in order to justify his personal political views.
I won't have that excuse this year, as I'm starting right off, and with a corker of an old favourite to begin the year. "The Sheikh and the Dustbin" is the third and shortest of GM Fraser's books of short stories, mostly set in the 2/Gordons, in which he served as a junior officer directly after WWII. I love the stories because they are a wonderful picture of life in a time and milieu that I wish I could have been a part of, but appreciate at the least having a glimpse into. There's doubtless a little rose-coloured hindsight, but my impression is that Fraser was pretty even-handed in his depictions of his brother officers, NCOs, and ORs, as well as the various civilian characters who wander through the pages of his stories. His ability to weave a yarn was stunning--some of his stories live in my memory as if I had experienced the events myself. He was a remarkably multi-talented writer--adventure novels, serious war memoirs, these gems of short stories, straight history, movie scripts, all entertaining, most educational, very little of it forgettable.
Number 2 for 2009 is John Keegan's "The Iraq War". I found this very disappointing in some ways, as I have rabbited on about to some of you at length. JK is a populist, but very accomplished, military historian who has specialised in writing good books that explain aspects of military history to people who don't know much about either the military or history. This book, published in 2004, is partly history, and that part he does well. The survey of the history of Iraq and the bio of Saddam Hussein and his rise to power are quite well done.
The account of the conventional military operations is fairly well done, but it tends in places to be a bit...slanted by the author's personal biases. Bias is inevitable, but some writers handle it better than others. Keegan wants to depict the British and American forces in the best possible light, and the Iraqis in the worst, but his desire to do both sometime trips him up. It's hard to praise troops for mastery of the battlespace if their enemies are nonexistent or completely ineffectual. Keegan disingenuously sandwiches several descriptions of brave (if foolhardy) attacks by Iraqi regular army and Republican Guard troops in between repeated assertions that no Iraqi military contested the allied advance, that the only resistance forces were foreign fighters or Saddam fedayeen. He describes all participants in the war on the Iraqi side, no matter who they were or what their role, as 'terrorists', an unfortunate habit reminiscent of the Soviet (and more recently American) habit of describing any resistors of state power as "criminal elements" whether they are breaking any laws or not. He goes into great detail explaining how the British operation to capture Basra was based on Operation Motorman in Northern Ireland in 1972, then mentions briefly that the final operation was nothing like Motorman. In fact, Keegan goes to great length to assert that the British Army succeeded brilliantly in operating in urban areas in the Iraq War due to their long experience in counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland; in the face of the stark failure of the British to maintain even a shadow of control over the city of Basra in the period after the end of the conventional war, these assurances ring grievously hollow.
So, history, military analysis...the final portion of the book (and far too large a portion it is for what is supposed to be a military history) is Keegan's analysis of the international politics preceding the Iraq war, the purported 'casus belli', and the UK domestic politics involved in the decision to go to war and in the aftermath of the search for WMD. This last portion loses any semblance of balance, objectivity, or (IMO) rationality. Keegan emerges as a huge GW Bush fanboy and a man who, in a fit of enthusiasm (or perhaps just a fit!) compares Tony Blair to Winston Churchill! Keegan touts an imaginary theory of of international relations called Olympianism (a term apparently coined and--as far as I can tell--only otherwise used by a retired LSE professor and member of a conservative anti-EC think tank called the Bruges Group). Keegan pretends that this rather fanciful and goofy theory, which supposedly rejects both law and military force as a means to settle international differences in favour of unenforceable negotiated agreement, accounts for the lack of support for the US/UK drive to invade Iraq, rather than a difference of opinion over interpretation of the known facts, differing world views, and sheer calculated self-interest. In this and in other ways, Keegan demonstrates that his grasp of international relations and diplomacy is as weak as his familiarity with military history is strong. In doing so, he demonstrates the degree to which he is prepared to engage in either barefaced mendacity of willful self-deception in order to justify his personal political views.
