Adrian Weale

The Case for Intervention

Can Intervention Work?

By

W W Norton 236pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

A War of Choice: The British in Iraq 2003–9

By

Jonathan Cape 431pp £20 order from our bookshop

Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan

By

Yale University Press 308pp £20 order from our bookshop

When I went to Sandhurst in 1985, there was a palpable feeling among us officer cadets that we had missed out on the only chance we would ever have to fight in a real war with shooting. The Falklands conflict had taken place three years earlier and many of the training staff at the Academy had participated; we hung on their words like starstruck teenagers. For most of us, future prospects revolved around maintaining deterrence against the Soviets, enlivened by occasional tours in Northern Ireland. But we were wrong. As Gerald Knaus points out in his essay in Can Intervention Work? : ‘The last two decades have been an age of intervention.’

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us