In Slaughterhouse, Adam Gopnik reviews David Bell’s The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It, which looks at, among other things, the Spanish guerrilla, or little war:
In fact, the Peninsula was the original intractable insurgency, which, in turn, shaped the modern model of counter-insurgency, and Bell doesn’t hesitate to draw parallels between our time and then: “Spain saw the development of a guerrilla war every bit as destructive as — and eerily similar to — the insurgency now under way in early-twenty-first-century Iraq,” he writes. Napoleon’s armies had taken Iberia at a time when it was not unlike the Middle East now: a culturally impoverished backwater, once grand but fallen on hard times, with a brutal, decadent ruling class and a fanatic clerical class, sandwiching a handful of liberals who at first welcomed the invading armies and went to work for them. In the beginning, Napoleon’s revolutionary army promised Spain reform and even democratic enlightenment. But, in short order, the insurgency grew, until the occupation of Iberia by the French became untenable; we see the nature of the insurgency, and its human consequences for victor and vanquished, in Goya’s series of etchings “The Disasters of War.”