[Still apparently unable to write anything more deliberate than comments online, I thought I could at least gather some remarks I made in real-time during the Nagorno-Karabakh War of last year. I believe a few of them may have a broader interest than the war itself for people who follow this kind of subject. Lightly edited to avoid (even more) repetition.] Azeri success and the psychology of defeat That the Armenian covering force in the plains to the southeast of Shusha was heavily defeated is not really the mystery. It was a vulnerable position held in insufficient depth by a weaker force. If one adds the devastation caused by Azeri drones in the first days of the war, that this covering force was defeated can hardly be surprising. The puzzle is about what happened next. Put very briefly, Armenian defense in the south concentrated on securing roads leading SW and SE from Shusha, leaving the mass of hills to the immediate south unguarded. And this was where the Azeris made t...
There are some great things in this book. I especially liked the accounts by Indonesian victims of 1965 and the American diplomat Howard P. Jones . The author told the stories of these witnesses to history responsibly and integrated them into a historical narrative. The author does a service to Indonesian voices that have never been heard before. However, I do not recommend this book for two reasons. The first is that while it reveals a lot of important background about the CIA methods for engineering coups, the book doesn’t end up proving its principal thesis that the events of 1964-65 constituted a “Jakarta Method" by American actors. The second is that it’s poorly written. When discussing Suharto’s 1964 coup and the ensuing mass murders of 1965, historians integrate internal and external causes. It is a complex state failure, not a Disney story with a single villain behind everything. The internal economic situation in Indonesia declined in the early 1960s after an initi...