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The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again

The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: short and sweet
Review: This second (third, if we count America Invulnerable) of Carr's historical books focuses on warfare against civilians from the razing of Carthage in 146 BC to the present day. Impeccably researched and beautifully composed, Carr's book provides what is arguably the best analysis of the history of warfare against civilians ever penned. Making good use of his prodigious historical research, Carr marshals a rich array of carefully chosen and fluently presented vignettes to create a daunting portrait of the history of warfare against civilians. Carr acts as the perfect guide through the enactments of the tactics of terror; he leads the reader into the field to see where the philosophies of war held by Augustine, Vitelli and Colonna, Grotius and Vattel, Hobbes, Frederick the Great, Clausewitz, and Moltke were applied and where they were ignored. From the Truce of God to the Geneva Protocols, from Hannibal through Giap, Carr tells a winding, enthralling story of personalities and culture, morals and law. As the narrative proceeds and we get closer to men of our time, Carr laces his discussion with a kind of defiant psychologizing - Woodrow Wilson was "criminally narcissistic" in his brutalization of Germany after World War II, France has never let a century go by without producing a egomaniac bent on hegemony, the National Security Act of 1947 was promulgated by the "clinically deranged" Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, and so forth. But that is a minor aspect of the book - just one of its amusements. I would have liked to hear Carr discuss the role of the instructors at ACTS (Mitchell, Miller and Sherman) in shaping rules of conduct for aerial bombardment between WWI and WWII. I would have liked to see him take a clip at the coterie that shaped America's so-called strategic air doctrine-Olds, George, Wilson, et al. I would have loved to see what Carr would do with the operational lawyers in the Black Hole during Desert Storm. In the end, Carr succeeds brilliantly at capturing all of terrorism's many sides, producing a book that is complex, engaging and invigorating.


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