War has not changed

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:18:32 +0100

To keep some part of my brain free of the issues of ruby, rails, prototype, jquery, and all that jazz I am reading Pompey the Great by John Leach pub 1978 (although the sources are 2000 years older).

Ever since I first saw I Claudius) about which I have written before I've been fascinated by the history of the Roman republic.

It's not the easiest book to follow because there are so many names and because the author assumes a more detailed understanding of the workings of the politics of the republic than I presently possess. Nevertheless it's fascinating to read Pompey's rise. I'm at the point where Julius Caesar is beginning to be referenced as one of Pompey's supporters.

But to this point the book has largely been a history of Pompey's, and Rome's, military campaigns. And this is what has struck me:

The consul Lucius Licinius Lucullus had been fighting for 8 years against the forces of Mithridates the Great. It was a war he was, although he came close, not destined to win. Being undermined by his troops and the politics of Rome. But he'd been fighting a foreign war for 8 years.

Some 2000 years later you can look at our own wars, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you can see the same thing. The nature of the fighting has been changed by technology, the nature of the reporting also, but not the nature of war itself. We've been in Afghanistan for 7 years and Iraq a little less.

In 2000 years the nature of fighting a war does not seem to have changed. Instead what has changed is our culture, our expectation of what war is, how it is fought, and how it should be won. Something can be news for a day, maybe for a week, but then people want to quickly move on. News should know it's place.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on pompey

War has not changed