Among the overworked comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, one similarity deserves attention. In both cases, when the United States and its allies encountered frustration and setbacks, strategists and commentators looked back to the Malayan Emergency and cited it as a case of successful counterinsurgency. There have, accordingly, been a number of historical inquiries into the Emergency, mostly in the context of “the path to Vietnam” or “how Vietnam might have been won.” This book provides a refreshingly different approach to the Emergency, and to the outbreak of the Cold War in Asia.
Forgotten Wars is about Britain's attempts, in the years 1945 to 1949, either to reestablish its empire in South and Southeast Asia or to depart in as graceful a manner as possible. The book is also about the numerous military conflicts and political struggles created by a miscellany of anticolonial movements—Communist and non-Communist, nationalist and separatist, some emphasizing...