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YEMEN Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962-1967, by Jonathan Walker. Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount Limited, 2005. xx + 300 pages. Gloss, to p. 305. Bibl. to p. 318. Index to p. 332. BP25.
The publicity for this book makes comparisons between the current fighting in Iraq and the war that the British fought 40 years ago in Aden and its hinterland, which is now part of the modern, united state of Yemen. Such parallels are not explored in the book itself, but it is a notable fact that Britain, unlike the United States, has long experience of counter-insurgency campaigns in the Middle East, most notably in Iraq and Palestine during the inter-war period and in Cyprus and Aden after 1945. These campaigns produced mixed results and the conflict with the National Liberation Front (NLF) and other insurgents in the town of Aden and the surrounding Protectorates was the least successful of these "small wars." It ended in 1967 with British military withdrawal, the defeat of her local allies and the establishment of a Marxist republic in South Yemen. The superficial similarities with events in Indochina have in the past produced another set of rather fanciful comparisons, with the Vietnam conflict rather than the most recent Iraq war.
Walker modifies this picture of military failure by providing very effective descriptions of...