John Keegan is England’s foremost military historian and, for many years, was the Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His book — The Second World War — is arguably the best single volume book on World War II and his book The Face of Battle is essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of the history of warfare. In short, when John Keegan writes about war, it is wise to take note.
In this London Telegraph op-ed, Mr. Keegan provides an overview of what the U.S. and Britain have accomplished in Iraq, and then makes a persuasive case for following through with what is an increasingly unpopular role in that country:

Critics should remember that, in nine tenths of Iraq, peace reigns. Thousands of Iraqi towns and villages are untroubled by insurrection and continue to regard the British and Americans as liberators. They cannot be abandoned to terrorists, fanatics and friends of the defunct dictatorship. To urge that we should go on as we are is an unpopular line of argument. That it is unpopular does not, however, mean it is wrong.
There is a final consideration. The Middle East is exceedingly complex, and one of its complexities is formed by Iran’s determination to become a nuclear power. To withdraw the Western forces from Iraq now would in effect be to encourage Iran to persist in its nuclear challenge. Even if, as the Foreign Secretary insists, military action against Iran is unthinkable, it is at least prudent to retain the capacity for military action in the region.

Read the entire piece.

A “Grotian Moment” is a legal development that is so significant that it can create new customary international law or radically transform the interpretation of treaty-based law. The trial of Saddam Hussein is such a moment, and this Case Western School of Law blog is providing expert commentary on the legal and foreign policy implications of arguably the most important international trial since Nuremberg. The subject of the latest post is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is a member of Saddam’s defense team. The post’s author — Case Western international law professor Michael Scharf — notes the following:

Clark is known for turning international trials into political stages from which to launch attacks against U.S. foreign policy. He has represented Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia; Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Hutu leader implicated in the Rwandan genocide; PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair bound elderly American who was shot and tossed overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1986; and most recently Slobodan Milosevic, the former leader of Serbia who is on trial for genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Sounds just like your typical former U.S. Attorney General, doesn’t it? ;^)

Don’t miss this important David Von Drehle/Washington Post article that provides a decent overview of the reorganization of the Defense Department under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during preparations for the Iraq War. This is an important issue that has been festering since the Reagan Administration and has major domestic and foreign policy implications (previous posts on the issue are here). However, the issue tends to fly somewhat beneath the radar screen for various reasons, not the least of which is the depth of the issue and the overshadowing effect of related issues, such as detainee policy.
Into this mini-vacuum of analysis, Mr. Von Drehle does a good job of framing the issue:

Diving in, he found his marching orders in a speech given by candidate Bush at the Citadel in 1999, calling for a “transformation” of the great but lumbering U.S. military. The Cold War force was built around big foreign bases and heavy weapons “platforms,” such as tank columns and aircraft carriers. With the Cold War over, Bush said, America should use the chance to “skip a generation” of weaponry and tactics to seize the future of warfare ahead of everyone else. A transformed military would be lightly armored, rapidly deployable, invisible to radar, guided by satellites. It would fight with Special Operations troops and futuristic “systems” of weaponry, robots alongside soldiers, all linked by computers. This force would be unmatchable in combat, Bush predicted, but it should not be used for the sort of “nation-building” that characterized Pentagon deployments to Haiti and the Balkans under Clinton.

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Rioting across France hit a new peak during the 11th night of rioting last night, as the violence — initially centered in the Paris suburbs — worsened elsewhere in France. From the original outburst of violence in suburban Paris housing projects, the violence has expanded into a widespread show of disdain for French authority from youths, mostly the children of Arabs and black Africans who are the products of high unemployment, poor housing and discrimination in French society. This Opinion.Telegraph piece provides a British perspective on the current situation.
Interestingly, Theodore Dalrymple — the pen name of British psychiatrist and author, Anthony Daniels — predicted all of this back in 2002 in this City Journal piece on the developing European underclass:

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This story has been flying a big under the radar screen (at least outside the blogosphere) over the past week, but France’s government is coming under increasing political pressure to find a solution for civil unrest in suburban France that has unfolded over the past week. Over the past couple of nights, rioting youths in the the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris have shot at police and firemen as they battled youths who torched car dealerships, public buses and a school.
The triggering event of the rioting occured last Thursday in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the accidental deaths of two teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation. However, the unrest is really the outgrowth of French society’s failure to integrate millions of immigrants who have come to France over the past generation, many of whom are unemployed immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa who live in poverty in low-cost, suburban housing projects. The riots are focusing attention on the differences between France’s generally affluent big cities and their poor suburbs, where the North African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children struggle with high unemployment, crime, poverty and a lack of opportunities. As with such ghetto areas anywhere, crime-ridden gangs dealing drugs and stolen goods control many of the more decrepit housing projects and are benefitting from the chaos of the current riots.
As we saw in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the line between civil order and unrest is fragile, and not easily restored once crossed. Daniel Drezner has more along those lines in this post and related comments.

John Keegan is England’s foremost military historian and, for many years, was the Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His book — The Second World War — is arguably the best single volume book on World War II and his book The Face of Battle is essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of the history of warfare. His latest book — The Iraq War — was published in 2004, and here are prior posts on Mr. Keegan’s views on the Iraq War. In short, when John Keegan writes about war, it is wise to take note.
Over this past weekend, over 100,000 Germans celebrated the reopening of Dresden, Germany’s beautiful Baroque church — the Frauenkirche — which had laid in ruins for almost 60 years as a bleak reminder of the Allied fire-bombing raids of February 1945 that killed 25,000 people and incinerated Dresden’s old city. The Dresden firebombing remained largely unnoticed outside of military circles until the early 1970’s when it formed the basis of Kurt Vonnegut’s haunting novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which in turn formed the basis of the 1972 George Roy Hill movie of the same name.
In this Daily Telegraph op-ed, Mr. Keegan uses the occasion of the Frauenkirche celebration to review the Dresden firebombing and to observe how Allied terror bombing during World War II raises difficult issues in these times of widespread civilian terror bombing against Americans and citizens of Allied countries. As with all of Mr. Keegan’s writings, the entire piece is well worth reading, and his conclusion gives you a taste of his special perspective:

In the last, remembering Dresden forces one to recognise that there is nothing nice or admirable about any war, and that victory, even a victory as desirable as that over Nazi Germany, is purchased at the cost of terrible human suffering, the suffering of the completely innocent as well as of their elders and their parents in arms. It is right to remember Dresden, but chiefly as a warning against repetition of the mass warfare that tortured Europe in the 20th century.

In a potentially significant step that could end over three decades of violence in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, the Irish Republican Army has ordered its members to discard their weapons. As noted in this earlier post, the I.R.A.’s continued use of terrorism in attempting to achieve its political goals — and some United States politicians’ often ambivalent stance toward it — represented one of the more troubling hypocrocies of the U.S.’s current War on Terror.

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Michael Ignatieff is the Carr professor of human rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and the editor of the new book American Exceptionalism and Human Rights. In this superb NY Sunday Times Magazine piece, Professor Ignatieff analyzes the risks that American society faces in pursuing a foreign policy based on the Jeffersonian dream of inevitable world-wide Republicanism. The entire article is balanced and well-written, as the following excerpts reflect:

Until George W. Bush, no American president — not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson — actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents’ “excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability” in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11.

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