Letters to the Editor

Give Peace a Chance

SIR: Former army officer Justin Kelly (April 2009) gives the game away in his opening sentence when he approvingly quotes the nineteenth-century Prussian militarist Carl von Clausewitz. A product of the Napoleonic era of massive, set-piece, somewhat mindless battles of attrition, Clausewitz remains a revered figure in Western military academies, where any criticism of his 200-year-old strategic thinking borders on heresy. Kelly joins the ranks of the true believers when he argues that, contrary to all the objective evidence of the last fifty years, a Clausewitzean approach will enable the United States and its allies, including Australia, to “win” in Afghanistan.

Clausewitz regarded the defeat of the enemy army as the key to (ultimate) political victory. Two centuries ago this was a valid argument because the army embodied the state through its relationships to the sovereign, the church, the ruling elite, and the treasury. Often, the army also physically blocked enemy forces from access to the civilian population. Thus, beat the army and you beat the state.

Clearly this is no longer the case. In the twenty-first century, military success need have no connection whatsoever to the only logical purpose for warfare, political change, as the West has discovered to its distress, but has persistently forgotten, in Korea, Indochina (twice), Algeria, Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan. Kelly’s exhortation that the West can “win” in Afghanistan by focusing on “the annihilation of Taliban power” by military force reflects precisely the same outdated application of Clausewitz that has caused so much grief and generated such disastrous consequences in the recent past.

There are at least two fatal flaws in Kelly’s prescription. The first—the changed political nature of states—has already been addressed. The second concerns contemporary attitudes towards so-called “expeditionary” wars. The problem here is that one man’s “expedition” is another man’s “invasion”. By definition, expeditionary forces will have to fight amongst the people of the invaded country. Military operations rarely provide a satisfactory answer to the extraordinarily complex socio-political issues they unleash; on the contrary, consistent with the vexed tradition of unintended consequences, they often make things worse.

The era has gone in which predominantly white, predominantly European, predominantly Christian armies could stampede around the world invading countries their governments either don’t like or wanted to control. The practical and ethical effects of globalisation have made that kind of mentality obsolete. Moreover, the subjects of invasion have learnt how to exact costs that far exceed any benefits an occupying force might realise. These days, once we deploy an invasion force, the Taliban, al Qaeda and their ilk fight on their terms, not ours. Thus, today in the Middle East and Central Asia, the most advanced armies the world has ever known are spending billions of dollars trying unsuccessfully to counter home-made roadside bombs and suicide bombers.

The suggestion that Western armies can fight “amongst the people” is a dangerous myth. There is little risk in predicting that the West will have neither the patience nor the fortitude to endure the thirty or so years that almost certainly would be needed to achieve some kind of military resolution in Central Asia. Probably just as well too: the last thing we want is to foster future generations of bombers who, unlike our armies, will be expert at waging war amongst their own people.

There is no question that our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan are dangerous and need to be contained. However, if any success is to be achieved, it will come from the application of twenty-first-century concepts, such as liaison with credible local alternative sources of power, with all that that implies. It will not come from nineteenth-century military strategies.

Alan Stephens,

School of Humanities and Social Sciences,

Australian Defence Force Academy,

Canberra, ACT.

The Beersheba Photograph

SIR: Had I known that my short letter was to be published as an article (March 2009), I would have said a little more: but before I do let me say that the two photos on page 84 of your April issue prove nothing but locality.

Fowler’s account of his own part in the Beersheba affair also describes the formation and disposition of the Light Horse squadrons; which does not agree with the photo. Also that they were initially trotting over the foul ground and wadis. After the fighting he says that he could hardly recognise a dead mate, George Cook, owing to a thick layer of facial dust. Where is the dust in the photo? But how did his friend get shot? Fowler says because he got off his horse to retrieve a dropped feed bag! Really?

He also says that as they went through the township, the defenders already had horse teams hitched to artillery. This takes quite some time. Fowler also found a kitted-up German officer riding away north. So what sort of defence had actually been put up? Were the defenders already pulling out when the Light Horse arrived?

On the other hand, since the Light Horse were not cavalry and usually dismounted to attack, it is possible that the situation was misjudged. Sudden strong resistance from concealed deadly trenches may have left no option but to spur the horses on and over into the township and start street fighting.

The casualty list was light: the 4th Regiment, eleven killed and seventeen wounded; the 12th Regiment, twenty killed and nineteen wounded—quite puzzling. Let me comment that as a one-time army marksman qualified in both rifle and light machine gun, I would have started picking off the photo horses at 1000 yards and men between 400 and 300. The question to ask is, how near to the defence was that photo taken? Close at hand? A Bren gun could have had that line down in a heap. The photographer would have been the first.

Murray Mitchell,

Bairnsdale, Vic.

Churchill, Rumbold and Manchester

SIR: While I welcome Frank Devine’s entries on Winston Churchill (January-February and March 2009) as opposed to his ill-informed condemnation of British India (January-February 2008), I must quibble at some of his details.

Frank rather implausibly referred to Churchill as having “somewhat impertinently” invited R.G. Casey, then Australian Minister to the United States, to be his representative in Cairo with the possible design of “short-circuiting Australia’s direct contacts with Roosevelt”. By then the United States was no longer neutral as it was in early 1940 when Casey arrived in Washington. Frank then charged John Curtin with “feebly” deciding to “leave it to Casey” to accept Churchill’s invitation. Curtin should have been as well aware as Casey that the evil and psychotic Minister for External Affairs, Dr H.V. Evatt, was putting the skids under him. With Roosevelt’s enthusiastic support, Casey therefore jumped at the opportunity to remove himself from Washington. While Evatt privately commended Casey, Curtin reacted with a public declaration of his hostility, thereby earning Casey’s implacable resentment.

Writing of Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire seat of the Dukes of Marlborough and Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Frank made this misleading observation, “As son of a younger son of a younger son, Churchill had claim on neither the dukedom nor the ancestral property.” If Winston’s paternal grandfather had been a younger son, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, could not have had a lifelong claim to that courtesy title. Lord Randolph was born in 1849, the third son of the Marquess of Blandford, the eldest son of the sixth Duke of Marlborough whom he succeeded on his death in 1857. The death in 1850 of Lord Randolph’s elder brother, Lord Frederick, brought him closer to the dukedom. When his only surviving elder brother, the eighth Duke, was succeeded by his only son, Charles, on November 9, 1892, Lord Randolph became his heir and so remained until his death on January 24, 1895. Winston then became heir until his cousin fathered the first of two sons on September 18, 1897. If the ninth Duke had remained childless or had fathered daughters only, then, ceteris paribus, on his death on June 30, 1934, Winston would have become the tenth Duke of Marlborough with implications for his political prospects at which we can only guess.

My more serious criticism is Frank’s reliance on that error-ridden screed by that long-winded amateur, William Manchester, an American who like Frank was bemused by the customs of the British aristocracy. As I explained to Frank when Manchester’s The Lion in Winter first appeared, I submitted it to an elementary test for accuracy by checking from his index his references to Sir Horace Rumbold. Manchester’s contention was that Rumbold was dismissed from his post as Ambassador to Germany because his sage warnings of the threat posed by Hitler were greeted with hostility. At a loss to find any source to justify such a nonsensical claim, I must assume that its invention suited Manchester’s interpretation of British politics in the 1930s.

Sir Horace Rumbold had been a distinguished diplomat whom Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, as Permanent Under-Secretary, had recommended as Britain’s first postwar Ambassador in Berlin only to have his advice ignored by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. When Rumbold was finally posted to Berlin in 1928 he was already aged fifty-nine, a detail Manchester could have gleaned from his Who’s Who entry. By August 1933 Rumbold had served in Berlin for four years beyond the official retiring age of sixty. All this was placed in context by Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary from 1930 to 1937–38. Lord Vansittart in his memoirs The Mist Procession mentioned Rumbold in the context of his own difficulties:

“An underling cannot agitate without charge of exaggeration. Moreover in that summer I lost a fellow-servant who might have done the trick, had he been born five years later. Horace Rumbold hid penetration behind a blank face. Curzon had thought him “not alert enough for Berlin”—oh, these great men—but little escaped him, and his warnings were clearer than anything that we got later. They began in that sober fashion which disturbs no week-ends; they even made initial allowance, but soon gathered volume. By April’s end he had alarmed himself and, given time, might have frightened the Cabinet, had he not passed the age-limit.”

Vansittart then for more than a page quoted with approval from Rumbold’s last despatch.

Rumbold had been appointed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in 1923 while in Constantinople and was appointed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) in 1933—not a distinction normally accorded to an ambassador under a cloud. Poor Rumbold most probably found little joy in that additional knighthood: as the ninth baronet, he was understood to have hankered after a peerage.

Manchester’s fundamental error on such a vital matter persuaded me to give his book a miss. I have recently discovered another error no less serious. At pages 215 and 216 Manchester interpreted a speech the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, made in the House of Commons on November 12, 1936, consistently with an old furphy—that Baldwin solemnly admitted to putting party before country in the 1935 election by pandering to pacifist sentiment and by not seeking a mandate to re-arm. Baldwin made no such admission on that occasion for one overpowering reason—he had in fact sought a mandate to re-arm in the 1935 election. Only those prepared to quote from that very honest speech selectively and out of context can sustain the calumny favoured by Manchester. This was demolished in November 1948 by Reginald Bassett of the Department of Government, London School of Economics, in an article in the Cambridge Journal, “Telling the Truth to the People: The Myth of the Baldwin ‘Confession’”.

While applauding Frank’s devotion to the memory of Sir Winston Churchill, may I boldly suggest that he cast Manchester’s flawed volume aside and consult the work of reputable scholars. For a start he should read Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (1993). I commend particularly Professor Donald Cameron Watt’s chapter, “Churchill and Appeasement”.

J.B. Paul,

Bellevue Hill, NSW.

Recessions and Deficit Spending

SIR: As a fellow “Dry” I sympathise with Steven Kates’s desire to discipline would-be big spenders in government (March 2009), but the empirical foundation he attempted to lay with potted history from 1929 only proves that history never repeats itself exactly, history’s facts are contestable, and that the world of capitalism’s creative destruction is immensely complicated and constantly altering in both causes and effects.

Keynes would have been the first to point out that the post-Second World War conditions in which politicians indulged in buying votes with no regard for sound finance was not going to survive the dying of Depression-bred fears and old-fashioned habits of thrift, especially when exacerbated by rigid labour markets and protectionism in a number of guises. About 1975, as Kates would probably acknowledge, the intellectual tide turned in the English-speaking countries, even extending to politicians. It is odd though that Kates mentions Reagan’s tax cuts without mention of either Volcker’s heroic curbing of inflation or the huge defence expenditure (and budget deficits) which primed the US economy until the Soviet Union gave in. Tax and spending were equally aspects of Reagan’s stimulatory budget deficits.

Kates’s key proof of the relative efficacy of budgets in surplus as against deficit-financed public spending lies in his table of Unemployment Rates for the USA, UK and Australia for 1929 to 1938, but it doesn’t add up. My first glance inference would be that the US 1929 bubble was so extreme that it is not surprising to see that its unemployment level rose from 3.2 per cent in 1929 to 24.9 per cent in 1933 whereas UK unemployment went from 10.4 to 22.1 per cent in 1932 and 19.9 per cent in 1933. Kates wants us to believe that budgetary sobriety in the UK was a superior remedy to the US deficit spending on public works from 1933. Set aside recent arguments that Roosevelt’s administration failed to run the deficits it ought to have, Kates’s figures simply don’t support the statement that the UK’s unemployment figures show that “England had by the mid-1930s left the depression behind while the United States did not do so until the war finally brought recessionary conditions to an end”.

Pausing only to note that Kates has just effectually conceded that the end of recession was brought about by the Second World War’s unprecedented deficits and that the spending had little to do with long-term productive investments, consider that Kates’s table has US unemployment in 1933 (when Kates says deficit spending began) at 24.9 per cent and in 1935 at 20.1 per cent. The UK figures are 19.9 per cent for 1933 and 15.5 per cent for 1935. Not much evidence there for Kates’s stated case against what he calls Keynesianism.

A closer approach to the complex and contestable truth would include these points. First, Roosevelt has been plausibly blamed for prolonging high unemployment by distortions of the labour market which made labour unemployable (and that’s barely counting blacks in the statistics). Second, there appear to be much better “reconstructions based on incomplete data” than those that Kates cites for US unemployment as showing the relative inefficacy of US government intervention. The figures he quotes treat employment in government work programs as unemployment—in contrast to Germany’s masters of spin who included prisoners in concentration camps as employed. Third, deficits began well before Roosevelt was elected and began to turn the tide in his first year, when a decline in unemployment could be attributed to Hoover’s deficit expenditures. Fourth, contrary to Keynes’s advice, the 1937 and 1938 budgets were almost balanced and recession returned.

James Guest,

Jolimont, Vic.

Absolutely Possible

SIR: While I hesitate to cross swords with historian Claudio Veliz, I was surprised to see his writing in the April issue, “Bearing in mind the absolute impossibility that anyone like Disraeli, in Britain, or Monash, in Australia, or Obama, in the United States, could have reached their high positions of responsibility in say, France, or any other major European nation …”

One understands that Obama’s distinguishing characteristic is that he is part-African. By “anyone like Disraeli … or Monash”, one has to understand that Professor Veliz is referring to their Jewish origins, as they have little else, if anything, in common.

Why is something “absolutely impossible” when it has, in fact, occurred a number of times?

Apropos Disraeli, Leon Blum and Pierre Mendes-France were prime ministers of France, Luigi Luzzatti prime minister of Italy, and Walther Rathenau foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. Apropos Monash, Emanuele Pugliese was the most highly decorated general in the Italian army in the First World War.

Peter Arnold,

Edgecliff, NSW.