The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

Winning Battles but Losing the War Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq William R. Polk, HarperCollins, 2007, $23.95, hardcover, 273 pages. R EVIEWED BY R OBERT V. K EELEY Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq is William R. Polk’s third book in three years, all clearly stimu- lated by the war in Iraq. Like its predecessors, it offers uncommonly useful expertise and policy guidance to anyone who is serving in Iraq, dealing with Iraq, or just concerned about the quagmire we have fallen into there. First came Understanding Iraq (2005), a guide to a country and its people and history that we knew almost nothing about before invad- ing it. A year later, Polk and co- author George McGovern spell- ed out precisely what to do to end our involvement there — by the end of 2007, no less! — in Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. Some of their more prescient and detailed recommendations included: sending home the mercenaries like Blackwater; halting construction of permanent bases in Iraq; letting the Iraqis decide how and to whom to sell their oil; and turning the Green Zone over to the Iraqis. Regrettably, their plan to extricate us from this disaster has been totally ignored by the administration, and by Congress as well. (Both books were reviewed in the Foreign Service Journal .) Now Polk has expanded his focus beyond Iraq to provide a history of insurgencies in many places over three centuries. As he explains, the common thread among the case studies is the fact that, in nearly every case, the insurgents lose all the battles but still win the war. They are able to do so because their enemy is made up of occupiers, colonists, invaders who seek to rule or otherwise establish their hegemo- ny; in other words, foreigners. Insurgencies go through three stages, according to Polk. The first is political: pursuing a cause that recruits a cadre to fight against the foreigners. This force depends on a supportive population, as in Mao Tse-Tung’s famous analogy of the fish in the sea. Terrorism is often the only tactic available to them at this stage. According to Polk’s calcu- lations, this stage represents 80 per- cent of an insurgency, on average. Next the insurgents create an alternative, anti-government ad- ministration in the country, a phase that lasts for another 15 percent of the struggle. Only the final 5 per- cent consists of traditional combat, yet that phase is what almost all books about counterinsurgency focus on. The book’s 11 chapters recount the French failures in Spain, Algeria and Vietnam, the British defeats in America, Ireland and Kenya, the Germans’ losses in Yugoslavia and Greece, and the American experi- ence in the Philippines and Vietnam. But the most instructive episode concerns Afghanistan, where the failing foreigners were by turns British, Russians and Americans. In fact, the long, painful history of that most unfortunately located territory is even more instructive than the sit- uation in Iraq, for it resulted from even greater ignorance and miscal- culation by successive foreign inter- veners. Yet despite the weight of all that history, and the many indications that Iraq will be the latest entry on that long list of debacles, it appears that the Bush administration has now set its sights on Iran. Heaven help us. B OOKS J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 73 Polk’s latest book expands the focus beyond Iraq to provide lessons about many different insurgencies.