British and American counterinsurgency since the nineteenth century. I intend to devote at least one long post to the book in the next month or two to really do it justice, but I do not have time just now to prepare it. Instead, I am going to address one aspect of his argument--one that was perfectly exemplified in an article by a Marine officer, Owen West, in an op-ed in the New York Times predicting that President Obama's strategy in Iraq was going to fail, and blaming the last two Presidents for what has happened there since 2011.

In Counterinsurgency Porch showed how recurrent myths have dominated the discussion of colonial and neo-colonial war from the French in Algeria in the mid-19th century through the British in South Africa,alienating essentially the entire native population except for those directly in their pay, and because neither world opinion nor French public opinion would accept an endless war along those lines. In Vietnam, he showed, the U.S. carried out some successful counterinsurgency experiments, but they could not make up for the endemic political weakness of the South Vietnamese government, the extraordinary organization of the Viet Cong, and the support available to the VC from North Vietnam, and to North Vietnam from the USSR and China. But critically, Porch also showed a continuing tradition of stab in the back legends surrounding virtually every lost colonial war. Thus David Gallula, a French veteran of the Algerian conflict, wrote a book in the mid-1960s arguing that the French Army's tactics in Algeria