The author's postulate is that disaffected elements of the population (an intellectually sophisticated 'elite') eventually cotton onto the nefarious machinations of their governments who are waging wars that, while capable of being won from a military standpoint, can only be accomplished at the expense of misleading the public to the nasty means required to do so. This is hardly a unique observation and, worse, was cloaked (in this book) in layers of ponderous and dense academic jargon.

A careful reading of the book indicates that the actual disaffected elements are members of the government, many of whom were part-and-parcel of the planning and implementation process for the very war they later decry (e.g., Daniel Ellsberg, Robert McNamera and others). These disillusioned former practitioners of realpolitik 'wake up' to the nasty particulars of the conflict and then incite domestic opposition amongst the 'intellectual' classes through the vehicle of newspaper articles, other media outlets and campaigning amongst their still 'imbedded' peers in government. Eventually, the domestic cost of waging the war trumps other factors and the democratic regime pulls the plug.

These observations are so obviously true as to be banal. The author creates a tautology in asserting that this phenomenon doesn't happen in existentially involving wars (such as WW-II, wherein an obvious clash between naked and unblemished evil and genuine democratic republican ideals is obvious to even the most dense observer). In the case of the French war in Algeria, the author incorrectly asserts that domestic opposition was responsible for French withdrawal, even though the war was militarily 'won'. He neglects to mention the critical role the OAS played in turning public opinion by their benchmark terror tactics when manifested domestically against the Republic and it's government. Similarly, in the US war against the Vietnamese Communists, the background of US domestic social discontent was ignored, as was the well-known and flagrant corruption of the South Vietnamese government, widely reviled at the time as a US puppet (which it was). No domestic disaffected 'elite' was responsible for that debacle: the social milieu in which the war took place produced the well-known outcome.

In summary, this book presented no new insights or perspectives; it was ponderous reading and lacked originality of presentation. It read much like a doctoral dissertation from a struggling international relations PhD student.

Merom's book, and Lusavardi's review essay which endorses it, share a subscription to an unhappy intellectual current: "the stab in the back" -- the idea that a worthwhile military effort is undermined by "intellectuals" back home, and that if we'd only been able to "take the gloves off" and be just a bit more brutal -as demanded by circumstances, of course-- then everything would have turned out OK.

But this analysis is both wrong, and a pretext for the suppression of dissent. One of the characteristics of all three of the wars that Merom covers is that they were long, far longer than the American Civil War, and than American involvelment in WWII. The length of these involvements alone belies the argument that if only "a little more time, or more men" had been expended then the outcome would have been different.

What they also share in common --and share with Iraq-- is that they were at best marginally legitimate. None of these "wars" included a declaration of war, nor the political unity that such a declarations require-- Begin's invasion of Lebanon was regarded as illegal by the international community, and unwise by many Israelis. The "casus foederis" for America's Vietnam excursion, the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" was as authentic as Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. And France wished to maintain as French an Arab Muslim territory which didn't desire it at a time when the international community --prominently including the US-- regarded old Empires as politically illegitimate.

An alternate explanation for why democracies lose such wars is that military political elites, having papered together a thin pretext for intervention, are unable to maintain such rationales against the steady wave of casualties, the hatred for the intervener for their efforts, and the lack of any defined endpoint, but you won't hear that in Merom's book.

Finally, we might add that the brutality argument doesn't wash. Rather brutal nations have failed at counter-insurgency warfare --hard to argue that the Soviets in Afghanistan "kept the gloves on", nor that their successors in Chechnya have either. Conversely, the British did put down an insurgency in Malaya-- one of the classic success stories in counter-insurgency warfare.

Blaming whingeing home-front intellectuals for the strategic errors of those who commit a nation's soldiers to wars without end is tempting, but wrong.

Merom's book, and Lusavardi's review essay which endorses it, share a subscription to an unhappy intellectual current: "the stab in the back" -- the idea that a worthwhile military effort is undermined by "intellectuals" back home, and that if we'd only been able to "take the gloves off" and be just a bit more brutal -as demanded by circumstances, of course-- then everything would have turned out OK.

But this analysis is both wrong, and a pretext for the suppression of dissent. One of the characteristics of all three of the wars that Merom covers is that they were long, far longer than the American Civil War, and than American involvelment in WWII. The length of these involvements alone belies the argument that if only "a little more time, or more men" had been expended then the outcome would have been different.

What they also share in common --and share with Iraq-- is that they were at best marginally legitimate. None of these "wars" included a declaration of war, nor the political unity that such a declarations require-- Begin's invasion of Lebanon was regarded as illegal by the international community, and unwise by many Israelis. The "casus foederis" for America's Vietnam excursion, the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" was as authentic as Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. And France wished to maintain as French an Arab Muslim territory which didn't desire it at a time when the international community --prominently including the US-- regarded old Empires as politically illegitimate.

An alternate explanation for why democracies lose such wars is that military political elites, having papered together a thin pretext for intervention, are unable to maintain such rationales against the steady wave of casualties, the hatred for the intervener for their efforts, and the lack of any defined endpoint, but you won't hear that in Merom's book.

Finally, we might add that the brutality argument doesn't wash. Rather brutal nations have failed at counter-insurgency warfare --hard to argue that the Soviets in Afghanistan "kept the gloves on", nor that their successors in Chechnya have either. Conversely, the British did put down an insurgency in Malaya-- one of the classic success stories in counter-insurgency warfare.

Blaming whingeing home-front intellectuals for the strategic errors of those who commit a nation's soldiers to wars without end is tempting, but wrong.