Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Books: "A Rage to Conquer" by Michael Walsh

 


A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History

By Michael Walsh

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 400 pages; $32.00; available today, Tuesday, January 28th

Michael Walsh is the author of Last Stands and more than fifteen other novels and non-fiction books. He was the classical music critic and a foreign correspondent for Time magazine from 1981 to 1997, and he received the 2004 American Book Awards prize for fiction for his gangster novel, And All the Saints. His popular columns for National Review that he wrote under a pseudonym, David Kahane, were developed into the books, Rules for Radical Conservatives. Two of his books, The Devil's Pleasure and The Fiery Angel, examine the enemies, heroes, triumphs, and struggles of Western Civilization from the ancient past to the present time.

Walsh's previous book, Last Stands, examined the lengths those doomed in battle will go to survive and possibly win against the odds, showing the power of self-sacrifice. 

A Rage to Conquer is the sequel to that engrossing work, as Walsh examines twelve of the most historic battles in Western history. The necessary context that he emphasizes is that war, as horrific as it can be, has been an essential part of the human condition since the beginning of time.

"It is the principal agent of societal change, waged by men on behalf of, and in pursuit of, their gods, women, and the sheer joy of combat, and in so doing to impose their will upon other men through extreme violence," Walsh writes. "Destructive though it is an must necessarily be, war is a primary engine for both scientific and cultural progress, driving both external technology and the inner exploration of the soul through the arts."

In looking at these crucial battles, Walsh highlights a group of courageous commanders and the wars they waged that have become crucial to the shape and course of our world.

Carl Von Clausewitz, the seminal thinker in the Western canon of war

Achilles at Ilium and the height of the Trojan war

Caesar at Alesia, the climactic military engagement of the Gallic Wars

Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, the epic battle that led him to becoming the sole ruler of the Western Roman Empire

Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains, one of the last major battles of the Roman Empire against the Huns and Visigoths

Bohemond at the Dorylaeum & Antioch - the Major victory for the 1st Crusaders against the Seljuk Turks

Napoleon at Austerlitz, the battle often cited as his masterpiece

General John Pershing at St.-Mihiel, the first major offensive by the United States of World War I

Admiral Chester Nimitz at Midway, highlighting Nimitz's crucial decision to send all his carriers to attack the Japanese fleet in World War II

General George Patton at the Bulge, highlighting his brilliant strategy to relieve the besieged Allied forces at Bastogne, Belgium

Battle of 9/11, the response after the attacks in 2001, and how it was ultimately lost by the United States.

One thing Walsh emphasizes for the reader is that these battles are presented in the context of the times they were fought in. He condemns the trendy practice of "presentism," where actions of the past are judged by current standards.

Walsh adds the last part on the current wars, especially after 9/11, to show the contrast of how the World Wars were fought with the U.S.'s recent frustrating experiences with foreign conflicts, as he writes in this excerpt: "George Patton and his coveals were the last American flag officers to win a major war, and Harry Truman the last president to preside over an unequivocal victory. Since Patton's death, the U.S. has participated in the inconclusive Korean War, as part of the United Nations coalition; the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961; the disastrous pushover engagement in Grenada in 1983, with no strategic purpose; the Gulf War of 1990-1991 to expel Iraq from Kuwait, a war in which the country had no national or compelling interests; a pointless and bloody failed intervention in Somalia highlighted by the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, which saw the bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets; a pointless intervention in a religious conflict in Kosovo in 1998-1999 under the fig leaf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance whose mission was accomplished in 1945; the civil wars in Bosnia from 1992-1995 that resulted from the collapse of communist Yugoslavia, again without any national interests at stake; and the Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2021, which, after an initial, punitive success following the attacks of 9/11, became a spectacular military and diplomatic failure ending in an ignominious retreat that is  without precedent in American history. That long and futile conflict includes the briefly successful Iraq War, which settled the unfinished business of the Bush family left over from the first Gulf War, but left intact the imaginary Sykes-Picot country of Iraq as a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran; and the purposeless bombing of Libya under the Obama administration in 2011, which resulted in the death of Muammar Gaddafi and rendered that country leaderless and rudderless but was celebrated by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton in her maladroit evocation of Caesar: 'We came, we saw, he died.' A less Caesar-like figure than the wife of a former president and a defeated candidate for the presidency in 2016, a woman of no particular distinction, and animated almost exclusively by a bitterness and resentment, can hardly be imagined.

It's an impressive litany of futility, made even more noteworthy by whom the U.S. did not fight in what has come to be called the Forever Wars: Iran, the architect of the hostage crisis of 1979-1981 that brought down the Jimmy Carter administration; Saudi Arabia, which helpfully contributed fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 and birthed Al Qaeda's ringleader, Osama bin Laden; and the People's Republic of China, which attacked the U.S. in Korea and, after the end of the Cold War with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, supplanted the Russians as the principal enemy of Western, and especially American, civilization. As of this writing, none has yet been decisively confronted.

One notes that in all the conflicts cited above, none conforms to the Clausewitzian dictum that 'war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force.' In each case, these wars of choice were fought along the invented limiting principle (found nowhere in the ancient world) that wars (a) should be defensive, fought in response to some provocation, and (b) any response should be 'proportionate' to the initial injury. In other words, the goal has always been a return to the status quo ante - a recipe for an unstable stasis that must eventually fly apart."


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