If I were a snooty European intellectual, I would blame the inability of many Americans to recognize the multi-sided nature of the current war in Iraq on American culture. "Americans," I would write, "can only think in terms of black and white, of absolute good and absolute evil. If you doubt this, just look at the films they watch, the games they play and the politicians they elect."

Fortunately, I'm a snooty American intellectual. As such, I realise that three-sided conflicts have been a staple plot device in American films for more than thirty years, that games like Monopoly, Risk and poker provide America with lots of people who are familiar with the dynamics of multi-sided competition, and that nobody gets very far in American politics without being able to handle more shades of grey than a high-end laser printer. Moreover, as a snooty American intellectual who has spent a lot of time studying the military history of Europe, I also realize that the chief cause of our strategic myopia is an idea that we borrowed from European intellectuals, and that is the notion that war is necessarily a two-sided affair.

Continue reading "Making Sense of Multi-Sided Conflict" »

One of my favorite public speaking techniques, which I probably borrowed from Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story", is to tell an obscure story as if it were a familiar one. Thus, when I want to introduce an audience to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, I start by talking about the "great civil war of the mid-nineteenth century, where the Northerners wore blue and the Southerners wore grey ..."

A couple of years ago, while giving an after-dinner talk to a group of dentists in Manhattan, I used this technique to introduce the subject of terrorism. I told the story of a man who had a career that was remarkably similar to that of Osama bin Ladin. The subject of the story, however, was not a present-day Saudi terrorist, but an English contemporary of William Shakespeare by the name of Guy Fawkes.

Continue reading "Remember, Remember, the 5th of November" »