How Democracies Lose Small Wars : State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam

Review
"The ongoing debate about democracy, war, and peace has been enlivened and enriched by this exceptional book." Journal of Political and Military Sociology


Book Description
Gil Merom argues that modern democracies fail in insurgency wars because they are unable to find a winning balance between expedient and moral tolerance for the costs of war. Small wars are lost at home when a critical minority shifts the balancing element from the battlefield to the marketplace of ideas. This minority, representing the educated middle class, abhors the brutality involved in effective counterinsurgency, but also refuses to sustain the level of casualties resulting from fighting in other ways.


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In How Democracies Lose Small Wars, Gil Merom argues that modern democracies fail in wars of insurgency because they are unable to find a winning balance between expedient and moral tolerance of the costs of war. Small wars, he argues, are lost at home when a critical minority shifts the center of gravity from the battlefield to the marketplace of ideas. This minority, from among the educated middle class, abhors the brutality involved in effective counterinsurgency, but also refuses to sustain the level of casualties that successfully combatting counterinsurgency requires. Government and state institutions further contribute to failure, as they resort to despotic patterns of behavior in a bid to overcome their domestic predicament. Merom proceeds by analyzing the role of brutality in counterinsurgency, the historical foundations of moral and expedient opposition to war, and the actions states traditionally took in order to preserve foreign policy autonomy. He then discusses the elements of the process that led to the failure of France in Algeria and Israel in Lebanon. In the Conclusion, Merom considers the Vietnam War and the influence that failed small wars has had on Western war-making and military intervention.


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