A look at America's global involvement in the Cold War

Small Wars, Faraway Places

Global Insurrection and the Making
of the Modern World 1945-1965

By Michael Burleigh

Viking. 586 pp. $36

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

The United States has never had an empire in the classic sense, they way European countries such as Britain, France, Spain, or Portugal had.

But like a doting, childless aunt with messy nieces and nephews, it spent much of the Cold War getting involved in other people's empires.

Michael Burleigh, a British historian formerly on the faculty of Washington and Lee University, takes us to the Mideast, the Philippines, Iran, Malaysia, Kenya, the Suez, Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria, scattering well-researched and gracefully written insights and anecdotes that are by turns chilling, hilarious, and mind-boggling.

What is missing is a thread tying them together, although one of Burleigh's history lessons is that every conflict is different and that the American military, in particular, is prone to choosing lessons from previous conflicts that fit their prejudices.

"Generals and military experts," he writes, "have ransacked this period for 'how to do it' lessons for contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, often by ignoring what tactics actually won atypical campaigns in favor of what best resembles what they want to do in the present."

In Malaysia, for example, he finds that the British "hearts and minds" campaign against local insurgents was successful only because they had killed enough of them before launching it.

His statement that the American "preference for charismatic individuals who spoke fluent English over mass political movements," which applied to Syngman Rhee in South Korea in the 1950s, might hold true to some extent to the U.S. dalliance with the eloquent mountebank Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq.

The author also has to deal with the difficulty of combining wars fueled by fears of the spread of communism (Korea), wars to preserve empire and resources (the British in Malaysia) and wars to preserve national pride and unity (the French in Algeria). Sometimes, as in Vietnam, all three causes came into play. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a special case, of course, presenting a direct military threat to the United States, although one can, of course, debate whether the Soviet Union would ever have risked launching its missiles.

The United States, Burleigh writes, "calculated that propping up colonial empires was cheaper than deploying U.S. troops, while accepting the argument that European metropolises economically weakened by decolonization would become as susceptible to communist subversion as their colonies."

He never quite makes this case, partly because he provides evidence that the United States could never have come up with a policy that coherent and consistent.

Much of the ground covered is familiar - U.S. and French miscalculations in Vietnam, the American role in the death of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, early American miscalculations that Mao Tse-Tung and Fidel Castro were anything other than committed communists.

Hypocrisies and miscalculation by the Americans and their allies didn't stop there, of course. Writing about the Mideast after the end of World War II, the author says, "Rather than encouraging Americans to overcome their own aversion to Jewish immigration, U.S. policymakers expected the Arabs to do so." He also notes support by radical and Socialist French politicians for efforts to hold on to the country's Far East empire.

But if one can look past the difficulty of establishing lessons that apply to the wars described, the anecdotes are rich and plentiful.

We see Ho Chi Minh dodging French checkpoints and patrols in Vietnam by "pretending to be a shaman, dressed in a black robe and equipped with magic texts, joss sticks, and a live chicken for sacrifice."

Edward Lansdale, the legendary American counterinsurgency expert who aided the British in Malaysia, plays on insurgent fears of vampires by having two puncture marks made in the throat of a just-killed Huk guerrilla, having the blood drained from the corpse, and leaving it on a road where it was sure to be found.

In his less successful encore in Vietnam, we see Lansdale working with an aide who claimed to have lost two fingers fighting with the French Foreign Legion when they were in fact amputated after his unsuccessful attempt to change the fan belt in a car in which he had been having sex with his best friend's wife.

The portrayals of generals and political leaders are unsparing and often amusing. Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff is dominated by "clones with his rigidity of opinion but without his flashes of genius."

Leading American diplomats included Averell Harriman, "whose sad demeanor belied a fortune of $100 million and whose manners, as those who crossed him discovered, were those of a crocodile."

Charles de Gaulle fares better: "Devoid of Gallic charm. . . . [he] used hauteur and stunning ingratitude to play a weak military hand exceptionally well."

But, of course, he was playing in a slow league.