Matt Yglesias

The Trouble With Insurgency

It’s interesting to ponder under what circumstances a smaller country being attacked by a stronger country will attempt to mount an insurgent-type campaign against the larger one. History shows that insurgent warfare can be extremely effective at driving great powers out, but the price tends to be very high — the insurgents destroy their own country. The United States lost the Vietnam War, but it was Vietnam and not the United States that wound up devastated by years of conflict. Under the circumstances, simply giving in might be the best solution. Certainly that seems to be Mikhail Saakashvili’s take on the matter:

“We had a choice here,” he said. “We could turn this country into Chechnya — we had enough people and equipment to do that — or we had to do nothing and stay a modern European country.”

He added: “Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.”

That’s kind of a funny way to put it, but it seems basically correct to me.