The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars And The Rise Of American Power - Hardcover

Boot, Max

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465007201 ISBN 13: 9780465007202

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

Max Boot's new book is a history of those smaller, undeclared wars that, he argues, have always played a key role in American international affairs. This story, he shows, has special relevance to the current "war on terrorism" and the future of American conflicts around the world. Written with a rare eye for both political nuance and real humor, this book introduces us to heroes and exploits from the forgotten side of America's military history. We meet Stephen Decatur, who destroyed a captured American warship under the Pasha of Tripoli's nose, Army Lieutenant George S. Patton, who shot it out, ivory-handled pistol in hand, with Mexican banditos at an isolated hacienda in 1916, and many other fascinating characters.Boot locates America's failure to win the Vietnam War in the American military's failure to heed the lessons of "small wars" of the past, and warns against repeating this mistake in the future. Reminding us that the small wars of the Clinton presidency--Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo --fit squarely in an established military tradition, The Savage Wars of Peace is a compelling read that also delivers an important new argument about the future of American intervention abroad.Among the Marines, it was said that Smedley [Butler] was dispatched to the National Palace to obtain [Haitian President] Dartiguenave's signature. The president tried to hide in his bathroom. The Marine waited outside the door for an hour.…Growing impatient, Butler walked outside, grabbed a ladder, propped it against the palace wall, and climbed up to the window of the bathroom to discover Dartiguenave sitting on a porcelain commode, fully dressed in pinstriped trousers, morning coat and top hat, smoking a cigar and reading a copy of Petit Parisien. Wasting no time, Butler supposedly leaped through the window to present the treaty and a fountain pen to the startled president. 'Sign here,' he commanded, and the president did. There is no sense inquiring whether this 'gorgeous legend' is literally true;…it gives an accurate flavor of how the U.S.-Haiti Treaty of 1915 came into being.

About this title

About the Author

Max Boot is the editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Reviews

As editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, Boot (Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption, and Incompetence on the Bench) has a reputation as a fire-breathing polemicist and unabashed imperialist. This book addresses America's "small wars" in chronological order, dividing the action from 1801 to the present into three sections ("Commercial Power," "Great Power" and "Superpower") to argue that "small war missions are militarily doable" and are now in fact a necessity. Beginning with a description of going to work on September 11 as the World Trade Center tragedy displaced the WSJ newsroom, Boot quickly gets down to some historical detail: from the U.S. expedition against the Barbary pirates to violent squabbles in Panama, Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Beirut, Grenada, Somalia and Bosnia. Examples of wars "that were fought less than `wholeheartedly,' " of wars "without exit strategies" and wars "in which U.S. soldiers act as `social workers' " are decried. Each of the 15 short chapters might have been the focus of a separate in-depth book, so Boot's take is once over very lightly indeed. While America's and the world's small wars certainly seem more and more related, Boot's historical descriptions are too thin to provide a solid foundation for relating one war to another.

The United States has the opportunity to establish a Pax Americana in today's world by jettisoning the Powell doctrine, named after Colin Powell when he was chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and emphasizing military deployment under limited conditions, and instead instituting an aggressive "small wars" strategy. So argues Boot, Wall Street Journal editorial features editor and author of Out of Order. Boot says that small wars, or "low-intensity conflicts," are about "the tactics employed, not the scale of combat" and that they have long been a part of the American story he in fact details several of the more than 100 small wars that America has waged since 1800. Boot claims the marines once had a small-wars manual and were such masters of small-wars tactics that, had such tactics been applied widely in Vietnam, America might have won that war. Although the political-moral ramifications of his argument as related to domestic affairs need more exploration, Boot has written a readable and thought-provoking book one that might well influence the behind-the-scenes debates over the future of military policy, as he hopes. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465007201
• ISBN 13: 9780465007202
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448