Political Booknotes Reviews

...de Klerk's announcement on February 2, 1990 that the time had come to include blacks in the government of South Africa...

...De Klerk did not help matters by shifting his position on several issues during the negotiations...

...Much more plausible is that de Klerk never intended to surrender at all...

...Some readers will find Keegan's subject too broad to fit comfortably between two covers...

...It's a process that could no doubt be repeated in the Middle East, and the lesson of South Africa is that the nitty gritty details of implementation are just as important as the emotional moments of breakthrough...

...It was only the advent of nuclear weapons, Keegan writes, that "exposed the hol-lowness of the Clausewitzian analysis once and for all...

...How else to explain the reaction of Japan's Samurai warriors to the introduction of firearms in the 16th century...

...As he was growing up, that would have earned the scorn of both his father and his elder brother Joe...

...In less than 400 pages, he takes us from the first spear-thrusting Neanderthal through the age of mutual assured destruction...

...But since negotiations began, he has plumped for a loose form of federalism which would give each group broad powers in areas of their "own affairs...

...But John was not his father or his older brother...

...Rather than embrace this technological advance, the Samurai saw it as a threat to the ritualistic swordplay that defined their profession...

...One need only scan the latest newspaper stories from the former Yugoslavia to know that wars do not always have a rational basis...

...Had he lived, my guess is that he would have been like his brother Robert, gradually less embarrassed by his idealism and more understanding of how the public needed to see that side of him...

...had ever dreamed...

...Reeves says Kennedy would have been better off using the Eisenhower decision-making system, which rightly required all the national security officials to be consulted, but wrongly excluded anyone outside that loop...

...Habits that are learned can also be unlearned: Keegan finds some evidence that the major powers may be starting to do so...

...But Keegan, a British military historian and newspaperman, finds Clausewitz's thought "incomplete...

...Politicians and generals have been invoking his convenient definition ever since, most recently during the Persian Gulf War...

...The constitution was cleverly rewritten, establishing a tricameral legislature with a house for whites, coloureds, and Indians (the first was sufficiently powerful to defeat any legislation supported by the other two...

...All we need to accept is that, over the course of 4,000 years of experiment and repetition, warmaking has become a habit," he writes...

...A History of Warfare is no dust-gathering desk reference...

...John Keegan has written a lively and comprehensive account of warmaking that succeeds on the strength of its provocative theme: Namely, Clausewitz was wrong...

...War, he contends, is rooted in all kinds of motivations that have nothing to do with policy as it is conventionally understood in Washington or London...

...Much like the recent Israeli-PLO accords, the notion of two old enemies agreeing to negotiate an end to one of the world's longest-running conflicts shocked the world...

...Keegan ends his book on a faint note of optimism...

...A president does have to be careful to consult all the obvious Joint Chiefs of Staff-types when he makes a military decision, as Eisenhower correctly criticized Kennedy for failing to do when Kennedy cancelled air strikes during the Bay of Pigs invasion...

...John Lancaster covers the Pentagon for The Washington Post...

...Evidence of this can be found in that February 1990 landmark speech...

...Thus when he disagrees with the view held by both Sorensen and Schlesinger that JFK grew dramatically during his presidency, he's dead wrong...

...De Klerk and the NP, realizing it's unlikely they will ever control the national government again, promote a loose federation of states, each with control over its own affairs so that the whites can retain their wealth and extravagant lifestyles...

...These trends combined with technological advances such as machine guns and rapid-fire artillery to produce the unparalleled slaughter of World War I. Clausewitz also gets much of the blame for World War II: "Revolutionary weapons, the warrior ethos, and the Clausewitzian philosophy of integrating military and political ends were to ensure that, under Hitler's hand, warmaking in Europe between 1939 and 1945 achieved a level of totality of which no previous leader...

...Circling at a distance of 100 to 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot [arrows]—might have transfixed six men a minute...

...So they confiscated every gunpowder weapon in the country, a rare achievement in national disarmament that endured for 250 years...

...He was much more sensitive than either of them, and the actions of his presidency show a devotion to peace, to avoiding wars that could kill thousands, and, even though he liked to say "Life is unfair," I think he had a deep belief in fair play...

...His animating premise is that Clausewitz was not only wrong but dangerous...

...You get the sense that the NP repealed apartheid not because it was oppressive or immoral but because the country, feeling the crunch of spiralling security costs and hard-hitting sanctions, could no longer afford it...

...Keegan gallops through history at the speed of a pillaging Cossack...

...By 1990, this token effort had neither lifted the sanctions nor decreased the political turmoil...

...Consider, for example, his description of chariot warfare around the middle of the second millennium B.C...

...From the Pan-African Congress on the left to the Afrikaner Resistance Movement on the right, these groups have increased the tension through political demonstrations and terrorism...

...His account is also mercifully short of pon-tification...

...On the contrary, he has demanded the privatization of national industry so that it will remain in white hands even if the government does not...

...Although rewriting the constitution to include blacks was risky for the white population, de Klerk admitted the country had "no alternative...

...Ottaway calls him "the consummate politician," and the president's tendency to waver soured Mandela on de Klerk and his National Party (NP...

...Unfortunately, this "reform" still left over 70 percent of the population (namely blacks) without political representation...

...Reeves tells the whole story, meaning that to the best of my knowledge he includes all the significant facts...

...Nathan Buthelezi's Inkatha party, in its battles with the ANC for supremacy in the townships, has fostered the worst of the violence...

...Chained Together: Mandela, de Klerk, and the Struggle to Remake South Africa David Ottaway Times Books, $24.50 By Ryan Walsh Almost four years ago, Nelson Mandela stepped through the gates of Victor Vorster Prison for the first time in 30 years...

...Conscription armies became the norm, military service a male rite of passage...

...In the latter category, Keegan offers the example of Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, who is reported to have defined "life's sweetest pleasure" as follows: "Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding and [use] the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support...

...Without contact and cooperation with the outside world," he said, "we cannot promote the well-being and security of our citizens...

...It is also struggling to transform itself from a guerilla movement into a political party...

...Alexander the Great, he writes, was driven to expand his empire by "vainglorious impulse...

...But now in 1993, Mandela and de Klerk—the Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding—are still far from reaching a settlement...

...If Kennedy hadn't grown between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, we wouldn't be here now...

...My own view, however, is that he has largely succeeded in knitting together history's disparate strands...

...The most useful lesson of this book is that culture, not policy, is the determinant of how and why men fight...

...During his four years in South Africa, Ottaway saw much to make him pessimistic...

...So if JFK had attended to this bureaucratic nicety during the Missile Crisis, for example, Robert Kennedy would not have been there to oppose the bombing of Cuba that was advocated by many of the most influential participants...

...How could war be an extension of politics, when the object of rational politics is to further the well-being of political entities...

...Reeves also contends that there wasn't a shred of idealism in John Kennedy...

...Occasionally, this is frustrating when you want to know more about what Reeves thinks is the meaning of an event...

...Botha faced similar international and domestic pressure and decided to include other segments of the population in the government...

...There are none of the long boring stretches that remind you of love scenes you saw in movies when you were a kid that made you squirm in your seat or run to the popcorn stand...

...He points out that some NP leaders believe that they, with their established strength in campaigning, can actually win an open election in South Africa...

...In arguing that war and politics are part of the same continuum, Keegan writes, Clausewitz gave ideological cover to the reckless militarization of 19th century European society...

...Others fought for gold, land, or simply for the hell of it...

...In race relations, for instance, though trying to be the tough political realist that his father could have admired, he nevertheless usually chose to do the right thing in the clutch...

...For all the ancient history he covers, Keegan's main focus is closer to home...

...Ten minutes' work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme-like toll among the small armies of the period...

...In some respects, Keegan's theme is not a revelation...

...It is more useful than its most distinguished rivals, Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s A Thousand Days, because it is balanced with a much fuller exploration of the administration's negatives...

...Ryan Walsh is an intern at The Washington Monthly...

...In 1983, the government led by P.W...

...It was the grand finale of an incredible turn of events which started with President F.W...

...I think it's more accurate to say that Kennedy had an aversion to wearing idealism on his sleeve...

...White South Africans have been forced into "reforms" in the past...

...Ottaway suggests that whites may not be willing to surrender their power after all...

...Mandela and the ANC would like a strong central government to oversee the redistribution of the fruits of Africa's wealthiest nation...

...And Reeves, not having been a presidential speechwriter as Sorensen and Schlesinger were, is not subject to the temptation to present speeches he wrote as examples of presidential thought at its most profound...

...A lesser writer might have produced an encyclopedia, but Keegan spices his narrative with enough vivid detail to keep things moving...

...A History of Warfare John Keegan Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50 By John Lancaster Don't be put off by the title...

...His latest book is a fascinating first-hand account of the initial euphoria over Mandela's release and the subsequent frustration of trying to turn a symbolic agreement into a concrete political settlement...

...De Klerk has also failed to offer anything that would lead to redistributing land (16 percent of the population owns 87 percent of the land) or economic power...

...David Ottaway, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, arrived in South Africa in 1989, just before de Klerk's historic speech...

...But he also must make bureaucratic end runs, as FDR did so skillfully, to consult with mid-level dissenting staffers and outsiders whose good sense he values...

...This is precisely the sort of stalemate that handshakes can't resolve...

...Exhibit A is the growing preoccupation with multi-lateral peace-keeping operations of the sort now being contemplated for Bosnia-Herzegovina...

...Interestingly, Keegan cites as the most significant bright spot of recent years not nuclear disarmament or the Russian rejection of Marxism but the Soviet Union's decision, "in the last months of existence," to back the multi-national coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991...

...This is a valuable book for anyone trying to make sense of an increasingly disordered world—one that Clausewitz would never have understood...

...There are sections on, among other things, the biological roots of aggression, "logistics and supply," and the geographic limits to warmaking...

...Mandela's African National Congress, an umbrella organization much like the PLO, contains several smaller groups, all of which are vying for power...

...Instead of initiating a period of peace in South Africa, the negotiations have plunged the country into the bloodiest period of political violence in its troubled history...

...On the other hand, it may be just as well that he didn't do more of this sort of thing, because he tends to fall into error on the few occasions when he does attempt to explain...

...So it is not surprising that negotiations have stalled...

...Karl von Clausewitz was the 19th century Prussian general and military theorist who asserted that "war is a continuation of policy by other means...

...As if the ANC-NP relations were not strained enough, radicals on both sides have tried to derail the talks altogether...

...This "cooperation" could only come with the lifting of the international trade sanctions, and the reforms he announced were similar to those demanded by the West...

...But while these factors have certainly hindered the negotiations, the root of the problem probably lies within the true goals of the NP...