An interesting little sideline...

Puddling through the anarchy that google calls its "news on Iraq" I ended up at the Financial Times. Linked at the bottom of the article that google had presented was this -

How Oxford has taught America a new way to fight battles

By Tom Baldwin

Study of Malaya insurgency is reshaping US policy in Iraq


THE success of DPhil papers by Oxford students is usually gauged by the amount of dust they gather on library shelves.

But there is one that is so influential that General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is said to carry it with him everywhere. Most of his staff have been ordered to read it and he pressed a copy into the hands of Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Baghdad in December.



Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title taken from T.E. Lawrence — himself no slouch in guerrilla warfare) is a study of how the British Army succeeded in snuffing out the Malayan insurgency between 1948 and 1960 — and why the Americans failed in Vietnam.

The thesis was written in Oxford more than a decade ago by John Nagl, now a US lieutenant-colonel and senior Pentagon adviser. It is helping to transform the American military in the face of its greatest test since Vietnam.

Read the rest if you want. It is quite interesting.

I want to give you the conclusion...

So how does Colonel Nagl respond to those who might say that he is an over-educated Anglophile? He quotes Sir William Francis Butler, the 19th-century British soldier, who said: “A nation that draws a demarcation between its thinking men and its fighting men will soon have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

Oh, as Baldwin points out, the "Malay Campaign" took a total of 12 years. You will find the history of NZ's involvement here. Reading that you will find that the "Malay Campaign" began in 1949, and the final anti-insurgency actions were not until the 1980's. That, by my reckoning, is some 30 years and more. OK, the "Emergency" was ended in 1960 and that is where the 12 years comes from.