:? I've been looking all over the net for this article and do you think I could find it? Well I could, but then I had to pay for the damn thing. It's still a good thing things are still printed on paper because I've found what I was looking for.
Comparing the Iraq and Boer wars
by Jonathan Manthrorpe
On Sunday, the most prominent Republican yet, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, drew a parallell between the quagmire faced by United states forces in Iraq today and the Vietnam more than 30 years ago.
The Vietnam comparison has been waved aloft by American critics of the war ever since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But it is only in recent months as the insurgency continues unabated, the U.S. death toll continues to mount and a satisfactory political settlement remains elusive that the Vietnam analogy has entered the mainstream of American reaction to what is happenign in Iraq.
It is understandable why Americans would look to Vietnam, with its still unresolved emotional baggage of failure, as the measure against which to judge the Iraq experience.
There is, however, a much better analogy that, unfortunately, should be much more troubling for Americans at this stage in their history as the predominant super power.
the Iraq war is a much closer match to the war the British, at the height of their imperial power, fought against the Boers in South Africa at the end of the 19th century.
There are interesting parallels in how both wars were engineered.
The discovery of gold at Johannesburg in 1887 led to tens of thousands of people, mostly British, pouring into the Transval in the hunt for for fortunes. Very soon these Uitlanders outnumbered the Afrikaaner Boers, who denied the newcomers voting rights to try to protect the sanctity of their republic.
Enter Cecil Rhodes, who had made fortunes from Kimberley diamond mines and by seizing what are now Zambia and Zimbabwe. Rhodes believed he had a divine mission to absorb as much of Africa as possible into the British Empire, and to enrich his companies in the process. It is easy to cast Vice-president Dick Cheney, his chums at Halliburton and his ideological brethren in the administration of President GWB in the role of Cecil Rhodes. Then the justification was democracy, gold, diamonds and land. Now it's democracy and the security of oil supplies from the middle east.
Rhodes attempted to engineer an uprising by the disenfranchised Johannesbury uitlanders, but the Boers struck first in October 1899 and with great success. The British quickly discovered they needed to throw the full weight of empire into the fight and by june 1900 had managed to capture the two Afrikaner capitals, Bloemfontein in the Orange Fere Satate and Pretoria in the Transvaal.
Missoin accomplished, it was believed in London, and there was much public jubilation. Then the Boers launched a Geurrilla war that continued for nearly two years.
The British comander, Lord Kitchener, responded with a scorched-earth policy; to deny supplies to the guerrillas he herded nearly 117,000 boer men, women and children into concentration camps. About a quarter of these detainees died of disease.
This treatment and the never-ending guerrilla attacks outraged public opinion in Britian. the governemnt signed the Treaty of Vereenining with the Boers in May 1902, which led to creation of the Union of South Africa.
But one of the lasting results of the Boer War was to expose the limits of British impperial power. This led directly to the decline and end of the British Empire.
British power was based on its navy, just as America's is based on its air force, but this technical supremacy could not easily overcome the determined Afrikaaner farmers with their rifles and horses. American air power is of equally little use against truck bombs.
One of the people who understood the message of the Boer War was Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm. He embarked on a massive program to arm Germany as a challenge to British supremacy. The result was the first World War and the mortgaging of theBritish Empire, mostly to the U.S., to pay for it.
China and Russia have learned a similar lesson ffrom the invasion of Iraq as Kaiser Wilhelm took from the Boer War. American supremacy has weaknesses and can be countered.
A similar 1914-18 outcome is not inevitable, of course, but Bush and Cheny may, like Cecil Rhodes, have hastened the decline of the supremacy they sought to defend.
Comparing the Iraq and Boer wars
by Jonathan Manthrorpe
On Sunday, the most prominent Republican yet, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, drew a parallell between the quagmire faced by United states forces in Iraq today and the Vietnam more than 30 years ago.
The Vietnam comparison has been waved aloft by American critics of the war ever since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But it is only in recent months as the insurgency continues unabated, the U.S. death toll continues to mount and a satisfactory political settlement remains elusive that the Vietnam analogy has entered the mainstream of American reaction to what is happenign in Iraq.
It is understandable why Americans would look to Vietnam, with its still unresolved emotional baggage of failure, as the measure against which to judge the Iraq experience.
There is, however, a much better analogy that, unfortunately, should be much more troubling for Americans at this stage in their history as the predominant super power.
the Iraq war is a much closer match to the war the British, at the height of their imperial power, fought against the Boers in South Africa at the end of the 19th century.
There are interesting parallels in how both wars were engineered.
The discovery of gold at Johannesburg in 1887 led to tens of thousands of people, mostly British, pouring into the Transval in the hunt for for fortunes. Very soon these Uitlanders outnumbered the Afrikaaner Boers, who denied the newcomers voting rights to try to protect the sanctity of their republic.
Enter Cecil Rhodes, who had made fortunes from Kimberley diamond mines and by seizing what are now Zambia and Zimbabwe. Rhodes believed he had a divine mission to absorb as much of Africa as possible into the British Empire, and to enrich his companies in the process. It is easy to cast Vice-president Dick Cheney, his chums at Halliburton and his ideological brethren in the administration of President GWB in the role of Cecil Rhodes. Then the justification was democracy, gold, diamonds and land. Now it's democracy and the security of oil supplies from the middle east.
Rhodes attempted to engineer an uprising by the disenfranchised Johannesbury uitlanders, but the Boers struck first in October 1899 and with great success. The British quickly discovered they needed to throw the full weight of empire into the fight and by june 1900 had managed to capture the two Afrikaner capitals, Bloemfontein in the Orange Fere Satate and Pretoria in the Transvaal.
Missoin accomplished, it was believed in London, and there was much public jubilation. Then the Boers launched a Geurrilla war that continued for nearly two years.
The British comander, Lord Kitchener, responded with a scorched-earth policy; to deny supplies to the guerrillas he herded nearly 117,000 boer men, women and children into concentration camps. About a quarter of these detainees died of disease.
This treatment and the never-ending guerrilla attacks outraged public opinion in Britian. the governemnt signed the Treaty of Vereenining with the Boers in May 1902, which led to creation of the Union of South Africa.
But one of the lasting results of the Boer War was to expose the limits of British impperial power. This led directly to the decline and end of the British Empire.
British power was based on its navy, just as America's is based on its air force, but this technical supremacy could not easily overcome the determined Afrikaaner farmers with their rifles and horses. American air power is of equally little use against truck bombs.
One of the people who understood the message of the Boer War was Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm. He embarked on a massive program to arm Germany as a challenge to British supremacy. The result was the first World War and the mortgaging of theBritish Empire, mostly to the U.S., to pay for it.
China and Russia have learned a similar lesson ffrom the invasion of Iraq as Kaiser Wilhelm took from the Boer War. American supremacy has weaknesses and can be countered.
A similar 1914-18 outcome is not inevitable, of course, but Bush and Cheny may, like Cecil Rhodes, have hastened the decline of the supremacy they sought to defend.
Of course not. 