World Conflicts by Patrick Brogan Bloomsbury 682pp, £25 in UK
In Europe, largely at peace since the second World War, we know there are wars elsewhere, but do we know how many, what were the causes, who supplied the weapons, how many casualties? Mr Brogan tries to tell us, although compression involves hard choices of inclusion and omission. Wars across frontiers are now infrequent: most wars are internal ones. We feel that the urge to destruction and killing during civil wars has ideological, ethnic, or religious roots, or springs from "mindless passions". However, in a recent Adelphi Paper (No. 320 - International Institute for Strategic Studies), David Keen argues that there are economic rationales for many civil wars. "For significant groups, both at the top and the bottom of society, violence can present economic opportunities . . . the apparent chaos of civil wars can be used to further local and short-term interests."
This argument has Marxist echoes but it implicitly emerges from many of Brogan's 114 conflicts. The Northern Ireland struggle has economic aspects - from the Plantations and the Penal Laws to the McBride Principles. The lucrative business in which Irish writers tell the British public what it wants to hear about Ireland is well established.
How reliable are Brogan's summaries? In a reference book, accuracy and objectivity are highly important. One way of judging his book is to look at conflicts of which one has some knowledge. His treatment of the Northern conflict, being familiar and easily checkable by the potential readership, should be satisfactory. It is, with two notable (but usual) lacunae. First - Brogan ignores the long media silence, and the averted eyes of the British Establishment. Proportional representation was abolished; the housing and job discrimination consequences of the Catch 22 local franchise became running sores. History will see with incredulity that paralysis prevailed. Secondly - Brogan shares the bland view that this distasteful matter has nothing to do with Britain, in origins or continuity. There is no mention of the "Orange card".
The thread of anti-Americanism in the book may be justified by Central American conflicts; this is hard to judge. The account of Iraq and its wars is generally good, although the formative influence of thirteen inter-war years of RAF bombing - aka "Imperial air policing" - goes unmentioned. Saying only, about this year's crisis, that "other Arabs opposed a new attack unless it was intended to kill Saddam himself" seems parsimonious with the truth. There is the little matter of Israel's nuclear weapons.
Lebanon is competently covered. Brogan says that the Israeli Air Force "inflicted immense damage on West Beirut" in 1982, comparable with "the Luftwaffe attacks on Rotterdam, London or the US Air Force attacks on Hanoi". Indeed, the city had no defences. The bombardment was from land and sea, as well as air. It included phosphorous bombs. After nearly ten weeks, President Reagan ended it with a phone call to Prime Minister Begin; hardly Israel's (or America's) finest hour.
The American-led Multinational Force (MNF2) had problems when it returned to Beirut after the Sabra and Chatila Refugee Camp massacres of September 1982. Irrevocably identified with the Christians and Israelis, its US and French troops, and their embassies, were relentlessly attacked by men (and women) with nothing to live for after the Beirut bombardments and Sabra/Chatila.
Understandably, the small (eighty-man) British contingent kept its sceptical heads down. Children cheered the Italians who had set up a magnificent field hospital near a refugee camp. Their doctors gave first-class treatment to the truly "wretched of the earth". Casualties - and decent Israelis - forced Israel's withdrawal. The American Marines did their best in a tainted cause; 1984 was an election year, and eventually, as pundits predicted, they were withdrawn - "re-deployed to the fleet", in President Reagan's phrase. Now if a UN operation failed so badly . . .
Brogan says that, except for the French, "the other Western garrisons promptly followed the American example". It seems that the British left even before the Americans, allegedly without warning their partners. (This seems unlikely.) The Italians took their time and left their fully-equipped hospital to the Beirutis.
Brogan's point that "tens or hundreds of thousands . . . take to the roads when Israel launches one of its [South Lebanon] air offensives" is not quite correct. A thousand air sorties in eight days on open villages certainly get the civilians on the roads; but the additional "12,000 artillery shells . . . fired with surgical precision" were probably more influential. (Figures from the Jerusalem Post.) The surgical precision included killing "about 100 civilians - among them scores of women and children" - refugees in the Fijian UN Compound.
Brogan covers Yugoslavia well, but blaming NATO for inaction during the forty-month shelling of Sarajevo is spin-doctoring, not history. "Terrorism" gets attention. Detailed, if depressing, appendices list Wars, Coups/ Revolutions, and Assassinations. Use this third edition of Brogan's useful conflict summaries with some care.
E.D. Doyle is a former Army officer who served with the UN