From: Monte Davis 

Max Boot's _The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American
Power_ (2002, ISBN 0-465-00720-1) is a superb popular history. He's
editorial features editor for _The Wall Street Journal_, but there's none
of the slant that might lead some to expect: it's an even-handed, primarily
factual, and *very* well-written chronicle of (among others)

-Barbary pirate campaigns 1800-1815
-Marquesas, Caribbean, Indonesia, China 1813-1859
-Korea 1871, Panama 1885, Samoa 1899,  China again (Boxers) 1900
-Philippines 1899-1902
-Cuba, Panama again, Nicaragua, Mexico 1898-1917
-Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) 1915-1934
-Russia 1918-1920
-Nicaragua again 1926-1933 (the original Sandinistas)
-China 1927-1941

... and an extended treatment of how we did *not* apply in Vietnam what
we'd learned in many insurrections and guerrilla wars before.

I gather his main motivation was hearing over and over in the 1990s (echoes
of Vietnam, Powell doctrine) that "there's no substitute for
victory... vital interests, full public support, overwhelming force, clear
exit strategy... public opinion won't stand many casualties" etc. etc.
etc. Well, we had literally "sent in the Marines" ONE HUNDRED AND
EIGHTY TIMES between 1800 and 1934... and scarcely any of those situations
had fit the shibboleths of the 1990s.

He doesn't whitewash the interventions that turned out badly; OTOH, he
managed to convince me against my preconceptions that many of our
"babanana republic" interventions had less to do with imperial
hubris or United Fruit than I had thought, and turned out better than I had
thought -- or at least that many of the truly nasty dictatorships there
arose *after we left*, when we stopped paying attention.

I don't know what (if anything) it can tell us about Iraq -- which seems
likely to be a "small war" in duration and US casualties,
although not in forces commited or -- for better or worse -- in
geopolitical consequences (bad, good, or most likely both). But it does
argue compellingly against the cliches of the left that acting as "the
world's policeman" is far from being a new role for the US, or must
inevitably lead to repression at home. And it argues compellingly against
the cliches of the right that military intervention is no more likely to
"put an end to terrorism" (or Communism or fascism or drug
dealing or...) than policing is to "end crime."

-Monte

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