‘We do deserts, we don’t do mountains’

Alex de Waal

• Soldiers of Diplomacy: The United Nations, Peacekeeping and the New World Order by Jocelyn Coulon
  Toronto, 231 pp, £26.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 8020 0899 2
• Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention edited by Jonathan Moore
  Rowman and Littlefield, 320 pp, £18.95, December 1998, ISBN 0 8476 9031 8
• New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in the Global Era by Mary Kaldor
  Polity, 200 pp, £13.99, December 1998, ISBN 0 7456 2067 1

Ineptitude and confounded expectations lie at the heart of military affairs. Probably not one war in a hundred has conformed to the course plotted for it by those who launched it. Journalists have catalogued many of the errors and stupidities of recent wars, and there have been some scholarly assaults on the territory, most of which are concerned with the British Army in its Imperial heydey and aftermath. Perhaps when US power has waned somewhat, we may see Americans becoming comfortable with the subject too, and attempting academic analyses of some of the more remarkable feats of precision air attack, such as the strike on the al shiffa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum or the neat destruction of the house next door to General Aidid’s headquarters in Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the nature of incompetence is changing. As generals come under closer political control and elected leaders are able to monitor and direct the conduct of wars on an hour-by-hour basis, civilian politicians are committing an ever-bigger share of blunders. In an extended hierarchical command system, the opportunities for mistakes proliferate. A competent frontline commander’s chance of failure is proportional to the amount of time he must spend fighting his own bureaucracy.