Re: HUMOUR> General History of French Warfare

                 Sunday, the 30th of November, 2003

I wrote:
   <snip>
   One comment: In the War of the American Revolution,
   one of the important battles was the Battle of the Saints
   on the 12th of April 1782. The last important battle on American soil
   being Yorktown in the Fall of 1781. What was the Battle of the
   Saints and why was it important? Well, it was a naval battle
   around the south Caribbean (Windward) Islands known as "The
   Saints".
   <snip>
   Anyway, the two opposing admirals were George Rodney
   for the British and the Comte de Grasse for the French. The Comte
   de Grasses was the singular phenomenon of a victorious French
   naval commander against the British at the Chesapeake Capes
   (which enabled Washington to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown).
Paul Danaher:
   It's Comte de Grasse,

Umm, I think I meant to type "The Comte de Grasse's was the singular
phenomenon...".

Paul: 
   and his earlier success was avoiding loss (with a
   superior force) against Admiral Thomas Graves at the 
   Virginia Capes.

Granted. It was by no means a tactical victory. It was
a strategic one, and wholly because the British gave up
and went back to New York, leaving de Grasse in a position
of being able to deny Cornwallis any exit from the trap
at Yorktown by sea.

The whole southern campaign, from 1780 on, was kind
of like that---Nathanel Greene fought a brilliant campaign
in which he tactically lost every battle he commanded, and
yet, by staying on his feet, and keeping on coming back for 
more, won the war in the South. 

Paul:
  There's a strong suggestion that the English fleet 
  failed to smash Grasse (as Rodney did later) because of 
  confusion over signalling, which prevented the English
  fleet from exercising the standard manoeuvre of crossing 
  the French line.

I was wondering if there is any such thing as another
French naval military victory (even charitably interpreted) 
against the British? Maybe some of the sequence of
battles between Suffren and Hughes in India would count, 
though that was pretty inconclusive. 

Paul:
  In any case, the terrorists in the colonies had already 
  succeeded on land (and become patriots in their turn), 
  and the Battle of the Saints was important as part of 
  establishing British domination of the sea, which in turn made
  possible the ultimate defeat of Napoleon.

I have a couple of comments here. First, the way you write leaves it a
little ambiguous as to whether you are saying the rebellious colonists
had already succeeded on land by the Chesapeake Capes (which is
where we were left by the preceding sentence), or by the time
of the Battle of the Saints. Of course, without the Chesapeake
Capes, and that French fleet to seal off any waterborne escape routs
for Cornwallis, Yorktown couldn't have gone down the way it did.
Second, by the time of the Saints, the British still had control of
New York and Charleston, and the Americans were in no position
to dislodge them, and there was no hope of any future coordination
with the French navy so as to trap them. Plus, the British had a number
of the western forts, as well as Canada firmly in hand. It's
really unclear why they couldn't just hang on indefinitely. The
Americans were bankrupt.

Anyway, I think it's funny that it was a French loss that 
permitted the British to acknowledge American independence
in a face-saving way.

Anyway, my second comment concerns this:
    the terrorists in the colonies had already 
    succeeded on land (and become patriots in their turn)

And it really is the reason I responded, Paul. Basically,
I find the dig to be, well, not only a dig, but an
ignorant sort of a dig. Kind of like when Noam Chomsky
likes to call Sullivan's Raid "genocide". It's cute,
and plays to a certain political bent, I guess, but
starts getting more and more dubious the second one
looks into it. I would suggest that terrorist
warfare is quite technically definable. That is, I wholly
agree with your implication that the Bushies like to just
sloppily call any thing they don't like "terrorist",
but it seems to me that the brand of warfare they
are encountering in Iraq at present is precisely terrorist
in a way that warfare in the American Revolution was not.

Terrorist warfare seems to me distinct from guerrilla warfare.
Guerrilla warfare is the targeting of military objectives by
irregulars who can move quickly, strike, and then disappear.
Francis Marion was a guerrilla warrior. Terrorism is 
different---it targets civilians and non-military
targets, with a deliberate strategic objective of manipulating
the ambient politics. The FLN in Algeria fought a terrorist war.
They lost every head-to-head battle that they had against
the French. But they systematically murdered anyone who was
in the political middle in Algeria, between the Arab nationalists
and the Pieds Noirs (the French colonials), until they
had achieved an absolute polarization of the two sides
and a political vacuum in which there were no unpolarized
leaders. And they bombed civilians, using civilian-disguised
small "cells" to perpetrate atrocities. So, what
happened in the Battle of Algiers was the French paratroopers,
fresh from defeat, and roughly-handled prisonership,
at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dienbeinphu, fought the
terrorist bombings with systematic interrogation under torture, 
and quite successfully managed to eradicate the FLN terrorist 
cells from the Casbah. The problem was the way this
played out back in France, when the ugliness of the paratroopers'
methods got to be known. It turned French public opinion against
the war, which led to the military revolting against the
French government, and led France ultimately to favour pulling 
out of Algeria. I.e. the FLN lost every battle, but lost their 
way quite intentionally to winning the war. The classic account 
of this is Alistair Horne's _A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 
1954-1962_.

Anyway, the issue is that this historically once successful
method of terrorism became a deliberate and planned method
of warfare. The Viet Cong used it quite successfully in South
Vietnam. It often gets called "guerrilla warfare",
but the systematic murder in the South Vietnamese countryside
of any potential political moderates wasn't guerrilla warfare,
but terrorism. It denied to the South and to the Americans
any possible political basis for rule in the countryside. 
Again, the Americans won every actual engagement. Again, what 
happened was the body count and the nastiness of the warfare got
back to the American democratic public, and, again,
the American government was politically committed to getting
out (to losing) by the time Nixon was elected in 1968.

The Palestinians have done this sort of thing continually
in Israel, killing civilian men, women, and children, provoking
reprisals, and then winning the propaganda war in the
leftist European press, where it plays out as mega-techno-death
Israel bullying the stone-throwing Palestinian patriots.
Europe and the United States are like the colonial
powers, and the Israelis are like the occupying colonials.

And, as long as the terrorism confines itself to Israel,
the Palestinians tend to win the propaganda exchange, with
the Western powers putting pressure on Israel to make more
and more concessions. The mistake for the terrorist strategy
is always precisely to attack the colonial power directly.
Thus, when the FLN tried that in France, it only started
galvanizing French public opinion against them. They were
smart enough to stop, and the Pied Noirs and rebellious elements
of the French military were dumb enough to commit acts of
terrorism in France, thus accelerating France's decision to 
pull out of Algeria.

It's why September 11 was probably a big mistake on the part of
the terrorists. In any event, to Iraq: The style of
warfare isn't guerrilla, it's more terrorist---the targeting
not so much of the US military, but of Iraqi civilians,
power stations, and oil facilities, NGO's such as the
UN and the Red Cross. This stuff is terrorist
strategy, not simply guerrilla warfare. It is designed to
control public opinion in the US, in Europe, and in Iraq.
So, my point is, I think the Bushies are quite right to
call this conflict a conflict with terrorists (though this
does not mean I think it's with Al Qaeda). 

(I am not sanguine that the Bushies---or anyone else I
have seen as a political offering---are subtle enough to
know what they are doing in order to fight it, or are politically
savvy enough to do the right things on the home front to win 
here.)

My point also is, I do not think there is anything
that could be called terrorist warfare in the American
Revolution. Maybe the Boston Massacre was like that,
sort of. A stone-throwing crowd provoking troops to fire.
Kind of like the intifada, though my sympathies (like John
Adams' sympathies) are wholly with the redcoats and with
the Israelis on that score. Perhaps you meant the brutal 
civil warfare that went on especially in parts of the South 
between Patriot and Loyalist? Maybe, though that just looks
to me like civil war always is anyway. I guess, back to Sullivan's
Raid---that was an expedition to upstate New York to wipe out
the Mohawk homelands. It was to little effect, since the Mohawks 
moved out well before Sullivan ever got there, and all that 
happened was crops and empty villages were burned,
though historically I guess it pushed the Mohawk more into Ontario 
than in New York. But the point is, Sullivan's Raid happened
because the British had certainly incited Iroquois (mostly Mohawk)
raids on American settlements in the west. And *that* tactic
certainly was directing an indiscriminate kind of
warfare against civilian men, women, and children. So,
it's effect was terror, and probably historically the exacerbation
of white American hatred of Indians. I don't know---I'm not
sure I'd call even the British tactic of using the Indians
against American settlers as "terrorist"---it doesn't have the
same intelligent design and strategy for manipulation of
public opinion that the modern terrorism does have. Probably
what is "terrorism" could not be without the liberal democracies as
a prerequisite, and the democratic electorates as the objects of 
its manipulative strategy.

               Mike Morris
        ([EMAIL PROTECTED])