2 posts tagged “history”

As I mentioned in my review of Pan's Labyrinth, ever since reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, I've been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War. It was a breathtakingly ugly war, with atrocities committed on both sides. It began as an idealistic People versus Dictator attempting a coup, but degraded into a choice between the fanatical right (Franco and the Nationalists) and the fanatical left, represented by the heavy handed Soviet Communists.

At the start of the war, there was hope of a real "workers paradise", which drew many idealistic foreign nationals into the fray. There was even an entire brigade, called, appropriately enough, the International Brigade, fighting on the Republican side. One of the people drawn to their side was a young reporter called George Orwell (soon to be famous for the books Animal House and 1984). After arriving in Spain, he immediately joined the P.O.U.M. militia and was sent to the Catalonia front.

After a couple of months in the trenches, not really doing much, he went back to Barcelona on leave, where he became an eyewitness and participant to an uprising "behind the lines", where some groups on the left battled against the growing Soviet influence. Some blood was shed, but eventually calm was restored. He went back to the front, where he was wounded. After spending some time in hospitals, he went back to Barcelona, only to find that the P.O.U.M. had been outlawed and many of his friends and compatriots had been grabbed and thrown in jail. He managed to avoid this fate, sometimes just barely and came back to  write Homage to Catalonia about his experiences.

What a great book, perhaps the best first hand account of trench warfare I have ever read. He really captures the tedium, excitement, danger and fear of the soldiers waging war. He even gives a very convincing and realistic description of taking a bullet. His foray into explaining the political situation is a little dry these days, as the events he describes happened 70 years ago. But it is indicative of just how reporting can be biased, something all too familiar today.

Kudos to SteveP for recommending the book. Even if you aren't interested in the Spanish Civil War, if you want a clear and involving description of what it is like to be a soldier in a confusing war, this is a great book. It is filled with humor and pathos, and you can feel the Orwell's outrage as he decries the abuses of power against his comrades, thrown into jail with little or no pretense, many of them destined to die there. He also has some great descriptions of the Spaniards. I loved this passage, as he is taking a train from the field hospital ostensibly to Barcelona, where his wife is staying:

One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today.. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hosptial orderly who travelled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. "Just like Spain!" I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there.

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

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I finally finished Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Ricks the other day, which made it a very unusual book for me, as I cannot seem finish these books chronicling the idiocy of today's Bush regime. I get too frustrated at the lack of responsibility and culpability.  Books like "Bushworld" by the late, great, Molly Ivins, or "Worse Than Watergate" by John Dean, get me throwing my hands up in despair at the prospect of our country ever recovering from its criminal mishandling by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumverate..

But "Fiasco" was different, despite how close to home it hits, as I have a nephew who is serving his second tour of duty over there, in a Stryker unit, on the front lines of urban assault teams.  Maybe because it is more of a military history of the general disaster that is the Iraq quagmire that kept it from getting too frustrating.  The politicos doomed the invasion right from the start, with mismanaged resources and fuzzy goals.  Amazingly to me, Risk assigns plenty of the blame to Paul Wolfowitz, the assistant defense secretary, who showed amazing clout for such a low level position.  In many ways, though, that symbolizes the Bush regime, where the shadowy masters control the stage from behind the curtains.

I had a great line ready to go, from a counterinsurgency expert quoted in the book, but unfortunately, I can't find the page I wrote it on. Basically, it was a sad retelling of the old "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it" maxim, especially vis-a-vis counterinsurgency.  While the parallels with Vietnam are striking, the author also goes to great lengths to compare the Iraq fiasco with France's battles in Algiers during the 50s, where another foreign power tried to control an Arabic counterinsurgency. In fact, one of the commanders there wrote a very influential book on how to wage a counterinsurgency war, a manual that was sadly ignored in the lead up to this one.  That reminds me - I should move the movie The Battle of Algiers up in my Netflix queue.

One of the most striking dichotomies documented by Ricks was how the Bush junta cherry picked all the intelligence for a worst case scenario when it came to making the case for war, while it continued to anticipate the absolute best possible scenario for its resolution, while making almost no plans for any other possible outcome. Rumsfield in particular is excoriated for underestimating the time, money and manpower needed to do the job right, which, in the end, made everything much worse. Paul Bremer, the diplomatic head of Iraq during the crucial early postwar reconstruction, also comes under heavy criticism for his heavy handed approach and lack of understanding for how things were working.  Another favorite scapegoat was General Tommy Franks, the military leader in Iraq, who didn't seem to understand the special nature of a counterinsurgency war, instead thinking that a heavy hand could cure all ills.

The author did seem to think highly of General Patreus, recently named head of all troops in Iraq.  In fact, the author wondered why he was passed over for this post at the end of the book, despite his considerable success in northern Iraq. So maybe there's some hope yet, although personally I don't have much confidence, given the incredible blunders made so far.  So if you are interested in the best political and, most importantly, military history of the "situation" in Iraq, you need go no further than Fiasco.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks