The War Shelf
Distinguished experts suggest wartime reading.

Compiled by Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO Executive Editor
October 13-14, 2001

resident Bush has made it well known that this will be a long war. And, as we know, we’re not going to be watching the whole thing on CNN or Fox. So, with the help of a distinguished group of experts, NRO has put together a wartime reading list — key selections that will provide a respite from the punditry.

Readers with additional book suggestions should send recommendations to warbooks@nationalreview.com for an upcoming NRO Weekend feature.

Andrew J. Bacevich
Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University

Waging Modern War by General Wesley Clark.
The commander of NATO's war for Kosovo and reputedly one of the brightest soldiers of his generation convicts himself of terminal stupidity. We are at a moment when all citizens should unite to support the nation and rally behind our men and women in uniform. But that does not mean that we should surrender our critical faculties. This is, as President Bush has said repeatedly, a new kind of war. Americans should be on alert for generals who lack the wit to understand what new conditions may require.

John Derbyshire
NRO columnist, NR contributing editor, and author of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream & Fire from the Sun

Best descriptive account of modern war: Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden.

Best war novel ever: The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat.

Best scholarly survey of the battle experience: The Face of Battle, by John Keegan.

Best battle scenes in non-war literature: Borodino in War & Peace, Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal).

Best battle poem: Tie between The Iliad by Homer, Battle of Malden (Anon.), and "Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Best account of the home front: Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain

Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Executive editor, The National Interest, and senior fellow for foreign policy and constitutional affairs, Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

The Ethics of War and Peace, edited by Terry Nardin. Gives an excellent perspective on how the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions view war and conflict resolution.

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, by William Dalrymple. If the coming conflict is indeed a “clash of civilizations,” the uneasy state of the indigenous Christians of the Middle East helps to illustrate the worldview of the Islamist radicals who see native Christians as “Crusader outposts” of Western civilization.

Peter Arnett, Live From the Battlefield. Not only is this a war correspondent's book, his predictions about Afghanistan have proven to be quite prescient.

Two reports of the United States Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century and Seeking a National Strategy: A Concert for Preserving Security and Promoting Freedom, in particular their recommendations for improving homeland security, delivered half a year before the attacks in New York and Washington.

 

Victor Davis Hanson
NRO contributor & author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

Dream Palace of the Arabs, by Fouad Ajami. A brave analysis of the contradictory and often mythical world of the Arab and Muslim intelligentsia, among whom Western scapegoating so often substitutes for real analysis of contemporary political and social pathologies, many of them self-induced.

Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. What causes wars? Not always what we are usually told — poverty, misunderstandings, diplomatic errors, and the like. Kagan, in case histories from the Greeks to the 20th century, demonstrates that weakness — so often cloaked as humanity and maturity — and especially the perception of such weakness in the face of threats and aggression, gets innocent people killed — and lots of them.

Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, by B. H. Lidell Hart. A controversial look at America's most misunderstood warmaker. For Liddell Hart, the slugfest of Grant against Lee, not Sherman's marches, was the real tragedy of war, while the presence of overwhelming force, brought to the very hearth of the enemy, in the end saves — not takes — lives. There is obvious relevance to our current crisis, both in the strategic sense and in the definition of what constitutes real humanity in war.

The Landmark Thucydides, edited by R. Strassler. A general reader's guide to the greatest of all military and cultural thinkers, who can reassure us that bin Laden really cares about his "fear, honor, and self-interest" far more than any purported concern with Israel, Western women in short-sleeves, or GIs in Saudi Arabia. For Thucydides, bin Ladens are not new, but of the ages and to be put down with reason, force, and humanity. War, as he says, is "a violent teacher" of the real nature of man.

 

John Hillen
NR contributor & author of Blue Helmets: The Strategy of U.N. Military Operations

Fighting for the Future, Ralph Peters. One of the few future-of-war books that address the dirty business of fighting "wars in the shadows." Peters is a keen-eyed military thinker with a Robert Kaplanesque view of the future, who spells out in operational detail what the advent of Kaplan's world (i.e., today) means for the U.S. military.

Jihad vs. McWorld, by Benjamin Barber. More incisive than Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Barber effectively describes the clash between recidivist tribal or religious forces and free-market, democratic societies. A slight lefty slant in the sense of implied moral equivalence, but that argument has certainly been put to rest by recent events.

Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden. The story of a semi-botched special-operations raid in Mogadishu in 1993 that led to the deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers. A heart-quickening book that reads like a long newspaper feature, it helps explain what the U.S. is up against in a war that features an opponent playing by entirely different rules that negate inherent American advantages.

 

Roger Kimball
Managing editor, The New Criterion & author of Tenured Radicals & The Long March

This conflict has often been described — accurately, I think — as a struggle between civilization and barbarism. But what is civilization? In the 19th century, the British knew better than anyone. One book from that great age that has been overlooked is Walter Bagehot's (pronounced "Badge-it," by the way: I am often asked) Physics and Politics: Or: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society (1877). It is brief, sparkling, and deliciously commonsensical. About the only thing to be said against the book is its title, which gives no clue at all about its contents. Talk about "natural selection" and "inheritance" naturally makes us think of Darwin. Bagehot had Darwin partly in mind ( On the Origin of Species was published in 1859). But in fact the book is not about biological theory but the conditions that civilization — especially advanced civilization — possible. "History," Bagehot writes midway through the book, "is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance." After the events of September 11, what more need be said?

 

Charles E. Miller
A retired Air Force colonel

To Hanoi and Back; The USAF and North Vietnam, 1966-1973, by Dr. Wayne Thompson, Air Force historian. An accounting of the air war over North Vietnam conducted by the USAF and USN, as influenced by the commanders, the men who flew the missions, and most importantly by the politicians, as they sought a means of winning the war against Hanoi through airpower.

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, by Mark Bowden. A recounting of the intense battle American Rangers and Delta Force soldiers fought after trying to “snatch” warlord Aideed in Mogadishu. Looks at the failures and successes in this intense battle that led to US withdrawal from Somalia.

 

John J. Miller
NR national political reporter & author of The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined the Assimilation Ethic

Agents of Innocence, by David Ignatius. I once asked former CIA director Jim Woolsey to name his favorite spy novel. He said John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the finest from a literary standpoint, but that Agents of Innocence, by David Ignatius, provides the best glimpse of how the CIA really works. It's set in the Middle East, where Ignatius was once a reporter who covered terrorism and intelligence. The pages provide insight after insight, and it's a treat to read.

A Soldier's Duty, by Thomas E. Ricks. This thriller by the Washington Post's excellent military correspondent is set in the year 2005. The plot really gets going when U.S. ground troops stationed in Afghanistan (no kidding!) stumble into disaster. For a close-up look at Pentagon culture, A Soldier's Duty is hard to beat.

Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden. A gripping nonfiction account of an American military operation gone horribly wrong in Somalia.

April 1865, by Jay Winik. President Bush has been reading it in recent weeks — and it's the best book on the Civil War since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Winik, a great writer, tells the story of how and why the American South did not become our version of Northern Ireland — and why great moments call for great leaders.

Mighty Machines: Fire Trucks and Other Emergency Machines, by Caroline Bingham. My four-year-old son was crazy about fire trucks and firefighters long before they started showing up on the news every day. This is his favorite title from an ever-growing library on the subject.

 

Laurie Mylroie
Author of The Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America.

Anthony Cave Brown, A Bodyguard of Lies. This book is the definitive work on the Allied deception operations that accompanied and facilitated the military campaigns of World War II. Deception is a “force-multiplier,” and the use of deception in war is as ancient as the Trojan horse. Yet Americans, with their pragmatic, empirical temperament, do not like to think in terms of deception, even as Saddam Hussein is very much a conspirator, capable of strategic deception. A Bodyguard of Lies provides a useful perspective from which to consider the events of September 11, 2001.

The Generals War, by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. This is the best account of the Gulf War. Among other things, it discusses the flawed decision-making of the U.S. military leadership, including then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff Colin Powell, and helps explain our present situation.

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, by Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis is the greatest living scholar of the Middle East, and this volume reflects a lifetime of learning. This elegantly written book is the most useful one-volume account of the history of the region.

Michael Novak
The George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of the upcoming On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding

Without reading Laurie Mylroie's Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, your sense of the background in which Bin Laden operates is impoverished. The next step up the ladder of terror, after the Taliban, is Saddam Hussein's regime. Get yourself ready.

The single best book on warfare ever written — I have personally given away ten copies — is Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, the story of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae holding off hundreds of thousands of Persians. It also the story of how the Spartans taught their young men to recognize all the species of fear in themselves, to pursue them, and to conquer each of them in every one of its remote habitations, until these young men knew they had no equals in courage and endurance. A man's book, a book to be given to sons, a warrior's book. The best account of the Greek understanding of virtue, courage, and character ever written.

Bravo Two Zero is the account by Andy McNab (at his retirement, the most highly decorated soldier in the British military) of the hardships and exploits of the team he commanded. They were dropped behind enemy lines in Iraq and obliged to fight their way to freedom. The astonishing rigors and hardships they endured helps one to imagine what hundreds of our own men will shortly be going through in small reconnaissance and commando units as winter approaches.

Mark Bowden's journalistic Black Hawk Down has been recommended by so many NR contributors that I hardly need to describe it. Its account of the teeming hatred of the Muslim streets, led into action by a few trained terrorist soldiers, and closing in on a small band of incredibly brave, highly trained, and technologically advantaged American forces, is a necessary lesson about contemporary warfare. Especially when you remember that the Americans first went to Somalia in order to save Muslims from famine.

Daniel Pipes
Director of the Middle East Forum and author of The Long Shadow: Culture and Politics in the Middle East and The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, among others.

The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, by Marshall G. S. Hodgson (3 vols.). Hodgson provides a deep history of Islam and of its role in the public sphere.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History. Smith interprets the travails Muslims have experienced over the past two centuries in a masterful fashion.

Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews, by Khalid Durán with Abdelwahab Hechiche. Despite its name, a survey of Islam appropriate for readers of all faiths, by a committed and moderate Muslim.

 

David Pryce-Jones
NR senior editor & author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.

As good an introduction as any to the mindset to be found in the Middle East is Fouad Ajami's The Dream Palace of the Arabs. By means of telling anecdotes, with lots of supporting detail as in a novel, he shows how people are actually thinking.

The mixture of self-pity and revenge which leads to extremism is also described beautifully in Kanan Makiya's Cruelty and Silence. Lots more illustrative stories. Makiya is a originally a Shia from Iraq, and in an earlier book of his, Republic of Fear (to protect his identity at the time he used the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil), he depicted Saddam's tyranny in particular; but what he has to say about one-man rule is valid for the rest of the Arab and Muslim world.

Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet — again full of detail — is a wonderful insight into today's Iran.

Probably the single best book is Bernard Lewis's The Middle East. Other informative books by him include Islam and the West and the illuminating Semites and Anti-Semites.

For another fascinating insight, read Daniel Pipes's The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. In the absence of freedom of information and expression of any kind, many Muslims interpret events with amazing — and sometimes grotesque — fantasy as one plot after another, for instance currently accusing Mossad of organizing the World Trade Center outrage.

 

Ronald Radosh
Author, most recently, of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.

I can think of no better book to read during this time than James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. In a short and very readable series of essays, McPherson gives us major insights on how President Lincoln handled our nation’s greatest emergency at a moment of national crisis. In particular, McPherson explains how Lincoln sought to balance security and liberty, and acted carefully to take necessary and unpopular domestic measures to prevent our collapse, even if it meant introducing emergency measures that he argued were justified on constitutional grounds. Just as the terrorists take advantage of our internal freedom and our hospitality, the North’s opponents during the Civil War, as Lincoln put it, acted under “cover of ‘liberty of speech,’” while their “spies… remain at large to help on their cause.”

If one wants to review our foreign policy and evaluate where it is going and from whence it came, I recommend Robert J. Lieber’s Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century. Lieber and a group of prominent authors — academics, political scientists, and journalists — assess America’s role in the new century and give readers the background to judge the issues surrounding humanitarian intervention, congressional-executive relations in the making of foreign policy, as well as the major regional challenges throughout the world, including the Middle East, Europe, Russia, and Asia. Major attention is paid to “rogue states,” defense policy, and international economics — issues that with the current crisis, are even more important to gain needed perspective on.

At a time when those on the Left are seeking to resurrect the old “anti-war” movement and to impugn the administration’s necessary and tough response to the terrorist attack, it is good to remember how those who sought to tell the truth before World War II were subject to opprobrium and disdain from the chattering classes. Let us never forget the honorable role played by George Orwell as he sought to tell the truth about the Spanish Civil War and the nefarious role played by Joseph Stalin. Orwell in Spain gives readers not only the full text of Orwell’s masterpiece Homage to Catalonia, but all of Orwell’s other and less accessible writings on the war. It includes his letters, essays, and book reviews, as well as the text of some of his radio broadcasts for the BBC. The excellent introductory essay by Christopher Hitchens puts his writing in context, and shows us how Orwell, as Hitchens writes, “did not share the febrile enthusiasm of the clenched-fist cheerleaders and propagandists.”

 

James S. Robbins
A professor of international relations at the National Defense University.

David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace is a very accessible narrative describing the formation of the current states of the Middle East in the years 1914-1922. Peter Hopkirk's Setting the East Ablaze is another very readable history, covering the postwar disposition of the Turkish lands of Central Asia. These books give a good overview of the complex ethnic and political issues of the region.

For people interested in ground combat in Afghanistan, you can't do better than The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War, edited by Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau. This book is comprised of a series of vignettes on a variety of topics (e.g., "Fighting Heliborne Insertions," "Counterambushes," etc.), written by the Mujahedin who fought the battles. The book was published in 1995 by Marine Corps Combat Development Command for public distribution. One caveat — this is somewhat technical small-unit combat material and may not be for the casual reader, but should definitely be in the hands of every person in the Afghan theater of operations.

Finally, I strongly suggest H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the use of force in international relations, and should be kept in the Oval Office as a cautionary reminder of the consequences of repeating "McNamara's Folly."

 

Stephen Schwartz
Author of Kosovo: Background to a War and the forthcoming Two Faces of Islam.

The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood. The clearest and best translation. Take it slow — don't expect to skim or finish it in one night. Read and think about each line.

Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews, by Khalid Duran. A simple and useful survey by a firm opponent of fundamentalism.

The Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch. Vivid account of a legitimate jihad — the 19th-century struggle of Muslims in the Caucasus against Russian imperialism.

Blanquerna and The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, by Raimon Llull. Difficult to find, but an extraordinary work. One of the greatest classics of Spanish Catholic mysticism, it shows the explicit influence of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism.

The Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq (Interpreter of Desires): A Collection of Mystical Odes, by Muhyiddin Ibn Al-Arabi. One of the greatest classics of Sufism. Easier for people with a background in poetry to understand, but rewarding in any event. Once again, don't expect to finish it in one sitting. And don't discard it as incomprehensible because the style is unfamiliar or seems exotic. Arabic and Islamic literature represents a different tradition from our own, but a great one.

 

Jonathan B. Tucker
Director, Chemical & Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program, Monterey Institute of International Studies.

For readers interested in learning more about the history and current threat of biological weapons, I would recommend the following books.

Biohazard, by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman. A chilling memoir by a former Soviet bioweaponeer who defected to the United States in 1992 and warned the U.S. intelligence community about the astonishing scale and scope of Moscow's germ-warfare effort.

The Biology of Doom: America's Secret Germ Warfare Project, by Ed Regis. An eye-opening history of the U.S. offensive biological warfare program, which President Richard Nixon terminated in 1969. Since then, all U.S. efforts in this area have been defensively oriented.

Biological Weapons: Limiting the Threat, by Joshua S. Lederberg. A compendium of essays, many first published in a special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, examining the medical, scientific, and political dimensions of the biological warfare threat.

Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare, by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg. An alarming survey of germ warfare programs in Russia, Iraq, and South Africa, with some ominous predictions for the future.

Jonathan B. Tucker, Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. A soup-to-nuts history of this once-devastating disease, which was eradicated in 1977 by a global vaccination campaign under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The triumph of eradication was betrayed by the Soviet military, which secretly mass-produced smallpox virus as a doomsday weapon. Today, circumstantial evidence for undeclared stocks of smallpox virus in countries such as Iraq and North Korea has made smallpox a much-feared terrorist threat, warranting the emergency U.S. production of new vaccine.

 

Jay Winik
Author of the recent New York Times bestseller, April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai. A classic. I read it last when I was in graduate school in England, but it remains a brilliant — and one of the very best — expositions on the Arab world and Islam. See sections on "the Psychology of Westernization," "Wajh" (face), "Self-Respect," and "Under the spell of language."

Power Politics, by Martin Wight. Another classic. A little gem of a book, rich with historical examples, and reminding us why we can ultimately never get too far away from national security and national self-interest.

The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. Another primer on remembering timeless principles.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ulysses S. Grant. This is a time of great testing. We have much to learn from how U. S. Grant led the victorious Union armies in the Civil War, the last time we were attacked on our mainland.

April 1865: The Month That Saved America. This is my recent book. Since this crisis began, I have felt rather often that President Bush is walking in Lincoln's footsteps. Accordingly, I have been drawn a number of times to the chapter on Abraham Lincoln and the burdens of wartime leadership (pp. 203-258) — including when I was asked to dinner at the Vice President's last Saturday, the eve of the bombing. Also see chapters 2, 3, and 6 for other potential parallels and lessons.

In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. This a RAND book. As the U.S. vigorously prosecutes this war, we can ill-afford to be sleepwalking for the next. The good news: This administration is well aware of that.