I just finished reading Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose's How Wars End, and I felt it would be important to write about this book in the lead up to the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, as this book has given me a vehicle by which to reflect upon the events of that day.
While the book comments infrequently on September 11 itself, this read has helped me contextualize the Afghan war in the context of the events of that Tuesday morning ten years ago and draw my own conclusions about the effectiveness of the fight against Al Qaeda. I am still mulling over more public comments about the day itself, its consequences, and where we go from here in both reflection and reality, but I think that Rose's study has been a great lens by which to evaluate recent conflict history that led us up to that fateful day. This is a truly excellent birds-eye accounting of the major armed conflicts in which the United States has been involved in the last century (I recommend careful attention to Rose's excellent treatment of Vietnam and the first Iraq War), while not falling prey to the tendency of over-generalization that a study of this scope may lend itself to implicitly.In fact, this work does a great job of putting the history of conflicts into reasonable political perspective. Rose makes it certain that while wars are fought, the majority of the conflict is political, and the success or failure of a particular enterprise is decided in the diplomatic phases of the conflict. I tend to sympathize with this suggestion, and I think that this is a worthy (and quick) read for those that believe similarly.
More thoughts to come soon on September 11 and its aftermath.
