Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency
Decorated British military officer Rose, commander of UN forces in Bosnia in the 1990s, has lately been an outspoken critic of the Blair and Bush administrations. Here, he compares the recent situation in Iraq to the American Revolutionary War, arguing that the U.S. present position in Iraq is as unsustainable as the British position in the colonies came to be in the earlier war. This is a comparison that many have observed but few have endeavored to truly probe, perhaps because of the inherent audacity of likening much-demonized Iraqi insurgents to the mythologized Founding Fathers. Rose pulls it off, however, by drawing on his military expertise and sticking to strategic- and tactical-level decisions in noting similarities, and by staying focused on the eighteenth century, resisting the temptation to overstate his case. Emphasizing Washington’s reluctant yet effective education in insurgent tactics, this selection sometimes seems more like a brief and pithy military history of the Revolutionary War than it does a fiery deployment of historical analogy. --Brendan Driscoll