28 Apr 2013 02:32:29
Small Wars is strewn with such details. It is an odd book – at once a history of the end of European colonialism, an account of American foreign policy in the early cold war years, and a comparative study of counter-insurgency tactics. Spanning the two decades from the doomed attempt to restore European colonialism in the far east in 1945 to the beginnings of the Vietnam War, its self-contained chapters cover Korea, the Malayan emergency, Hungary, Suez, the war in Algeria, Mau Mau in Kenya and the Cuban missile crisis with formidable intelligence, scholarship and literary craft. These are small masterpieces of lucidity and concision, with complex political backcloths effortlessly painted in and characters as diverse as Mao Zedong and General Douglas MacArthur brought sharply into focus. Though Burleigh writes for American readers and noisily parades his rightwing prejudices – jibes at self-deluding liberals abound – he is no neocon hack, but a cold realist about human behaviour; as scathing about Washington's behaviour in its Latin American backyard and British colonial atrocities as of communist terror. Anyone wanting short snappy summaries of events in, say, Malaya, need look no further.
That said, the book never quite hangs together and the serial narrative method it uses gradually exhausts both writer and reader. As Small Wars reaches the 1960s, and Burleigh draws up the now familiar indictment against President John F Kennedy (one of his special bugbears), this reviewer began to long for something of greater analytical depth and to tire of his relentless cleverness and infinite delight in human folly and cruelty. Eric Hobsbawm once said that the gods had given EP Thompson all the gifts, except judgment and an internal subeditor. In a different way, Michael Burleigh has all the attributes of a great historian – except largesse of spirit.
