The British occupation of Mesopotamia, 1914–1922

During World War I the military campaign in Mesopotamia placed enormous demands on local man- and animal power to provide the logistical resources vital to its conduct. This required the British civil and military authorities to construct a wartime state apparatus that filled the administrative vacuum left by the retreating Ottomans and made possible its downward penetration and mobilisation of local resources for the war effort. This article examines the interaction of politics and logistics in Mesopotamia and views the enhanced wartime levels of resource extraction in light of the British attempts to codify their presence in the country after 1918 and the nationalist backlash that resulted.     

Total war

Abstract

This article reviews the five volume series, published by Cambridge University Press, on the history of total war from the American Civil War and Wars of German Unification to World War II. The discussion focuses on two questions: how to define total war; and is total war a useful conceptual tool for understanding warfare during this period? Although the editors were unable to come up with a definition of total war, they did identify elements or tendencies that together contributed to the growing totalization of war during the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries. Regarding the second question, the editors suggest that total war is best thought of as an ideal type, one to which reality can approach but never reach. If this use of total war facilitates comparison between wars (and different aspects of one war) by providing a common standard, it leaves open the question of how to undertake such a comparison.     

Major Stepan Stebelski of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army: examples of insurgency leadership and tactics

This is a biographical analysis of Stepan Stebelski (‘Khrin’) and his time in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. His military command is an example of classic insurgency tactics and strategies. He was trained in underground tactics before the Second World War, used his image very effectively during his time in the UPA, and used his knowledge of the terrain to become an exceptional enemy against Soviet and Polish authorities.     

Abd el-Krim's guerrilla war against Spain and France in North Africa: An adventure setting for screen melodramas

The Riffian rebel leader Mohammed Abd el-Krim Al-Khattabi (1882–1963) became an important early guerrilla leader by successfully initiating extensively organized resistance in the Moroccan Rif against Spanish and French imperial power in the early 1920s. The Rif War triggered a wave of adventure films since the 1930s. This article will look at some of these, especially Sergeant Klems (1971) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), and suggest that they can be seen in terms of the wider impact of screen Orientalism derived from the iconic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) directed by David Lean. The article will show that these films promoted what it terms a colonial gaze by underlining many stereotyped cinematic clichés relating to the Islamic cultural area and Abd el-Krim's revolt that stretch back to the early history of cinema.     

Economic theorizing of conflict: Historical contributions,future possibilities

This article is organized around two major topics addressed by nineteenth and early twentieth century economists: (1) international economic relations and war and (2) economic activity in the shadow of conflict. My thesis is that an early and neglected reservoir of economic thought on peace and war exists and valuable perspectives on research in defense and peace economics can be gained by tapping into it.     

The impact of strategy and measurement on models of French military expenditure

The intention of this paper is to analyse why people go to war, despite the, at first sight, divergence between benefits and costs. This paper provides a comparison of the willingness to go to war in different OECD countries using World Values Survey data. The empirical findings in the United States, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and West Germany, using the willingness to fight as a dependent variable, indicate that such factors as pride, trust, and political ideology significantly influence individuals' willingness to go to war.     

The Colonial War revisited

The Carnation Revolution on 25 April 1974 toppled the authoritarian regime in Lisbon. It is fallacious to conclude, however, that the 1974 coup d’état signaled Portugal's defeat in the Colonial War. The status of each conflict on the eve of the Carnation Revolution varied, and it was by no means inevitable that Portugal would have been defeated in all three theatres had the coup not occurred. This brief research note therefore advances a novel approach to examining the Colonial War by assessing the outcomes prior to the 1974 coup. In particular, the author proposes that Portugal achieved military victory in Angola and Mozambique, but was defeated in Guinea-Bissau.     

CONTRIBUTORS

Conventional wisdom states that the stability-instability paradox does not explain the effect of nuclear proliferation on the conflict propensity of South Asia, and that nuclear weapons have had a different and more dangerous impact in South Asia than Cold War Europe. I argue that the paradox explains nuclear South Asia; that the similarities between nuclear South Asia and Cold War Europe are strong; and that conventional instability does not cause revisionist challenges in the long run. I develop and probe a psychological causal mechanism that explains the impact of nuclear weapons on Cold War Europe and South Asia. Following the ten-month mobilized crisis in 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may have adopted a more moderate foreign policy toward India after experiencing fear of imminent nuclear war, as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did forty years earlier. I argue that the stability-instability paradox explains Cold War Europe and nuclear South Asia and will, conditional on Iranian and North Korean revisionism, predict the impact of nuclear weapon development on these states' conflict propensities.     

WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

Nuclear optimists and pessimists disagree on whether the odds of nuclear war are low or high. This viewpoint assesses the odds of nuclear war over the past sixty-six years, exploring three pathways to nuclear war: an international crisis leading directly to nuclear war, an accident or misperception leading to nuclear escalation or nuclear retaliation against an imaginary attack, and a general conventional war leading to nuclear war. The assessment is based on the application of Bayes's theorem and other statistical reasoning and finds that the expected probability of nuclear war during this historical period was greater than 50 percent. This level of risk is unacceptably high. It is therefore urgent that effective measures be taken to substantially reduce the risk of nuclear war.     

HOW WAS THE COLD WAR WON?

Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, by Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. Crown Publishers, 2009. 464 pages, $32.50.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann. Viking, 2009. 410 pages, $27.95.