Is Saddam winning political war?

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Wed Mar 26 18:24:55 PST 2003


Clausewitz has BTW been held rather high regard by Marxists. Both Marx and Engels (who fancied himself an expert in military matters) had great admiration for the old Prussian officer, as did Lenin later on, who often quoted him in his writings.

Jim F.

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 21:10:23 -0500 (EST) Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> writes:
>
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> > Its always good to keep in mind Cluaswitz's old maxim that "war is
> > politics carried out by other means."
>
> Clauswitz's model only applied to a vanished world in which
> countries
> could plausibly be reduced to points of policy because they were all
> autocracies. The will of each state was the will of one man.
> Domestic
> politics didn't matter at all his world. That wasn't the "politics"
> he
> was talking about. For all he learned from Napoleon, his model
> assumed
> mass mobilization was no different that using a professional army
> caste.
> He was right in 1870 (which was when his book became famous, not
> because
> of what he said, but because it of what German generals did, which
> people
> wanted to learn the secret of). He was dreadfully wrong in 1914,
> when
> every country had imitated Germany. If there was ever a war that
> didn't
> further any country's interests, that was the one.
>
> From that point on, Clauswitz's model ceased to be able to describe
> the
> dynamics of either major clashes or major guerrilla wars. The only
> thing
> it continues to apply to are precisely those imperial police actions
> that
> are so clearly venal that they don't need a theory to explain them.
>
> That doesn't mean that smart people can't say smart things after
> ritually
> citing Clauswitz. But I think it would be better if we retired the
> ritual.
>
> Michael
>

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