Military commanders love to tell you that they have based their campaigns on a close reading of the techniques of ancient warmongers. When Stormin' Norman told Timewatch that he studied Hannibal before going in to bat against Saddam, it was rather like those mediocre novelists who like to claim they've been influenced by Flaubert in the hope that you'll treat their work with the same seriousness you'd give Madame Bovary.

The difference is that military tactics always seem so much more banal than literary tactics. Schwarzkopf, all storm

The other thing he learnt from Hannibal was the element of surprise, which means, I imagine, that the. great Carthaginian kept CNN well away from the elephants on the trip north.

Indeed, it was when Schwarzkopf got to the tip about surprise that his thesis -- the Allies J Saddam was Hannibal v the Romans re-enacted -- started to sound less than convincing. Hannibal's surprises were that he took the scenic route to Italy via Spain rather than crossing the Mediterranean, that he turned north and crossed the Alps rather than sticking to the littoral, that he took elephants with him on the trip. Schwarzkopf's only surprise was that the US and its allies -- its pro tem allies, as it turned out -- would go to war to save plucky little Kuwait.

Schwarzkopf, billed as a semi-recluse tempted out of the bunker by the promise of talk about Hannibal, appeared only intermittently. The narrative was fleshed out by lesser warriors. Lieutenant-Colonel Mungo Marvin, a man who wears a collar and tie when being interviewed on a back packing trip, spends his down-time walking elephants across the Alps to get that genuine Hannibal buzz, and came on to tell us what a fag it must all have been for the Carthaginians. The pseudonymous Andy McNabb, late of the SAS and Waterstones, appeared in silhouette, drawing on his experience as a lone tactical fighter to explain what mass hand-to-hand combat at Cannae must have been like.

As it was, the final element of the thesis showed that whatever Schwarzkopf had learnt from the classics, his masters had learnt nothing at all. Hannibal stopped short of the assault on the final military objective because he assumed that an armyless Rome would collapse into civil disorder, leaving it free for a more biddable regime to take over. It didn't, and Rome grew to greater glory. And, as the Stormmeister explained, the Allies, stopped short of taking Baghdad because they assumed that a defeated and humiliated Saddam Hussein would be replaced by an Iraqi with more sympathetic understanding of the west's dependency on Arab oil. Governments never learn. And nor, it seems, do TV stations with an eye to the ratings. 

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Author/s: John Diamond Timewatch : Sept 13, 1996 COPYRIGHT 1996 New Statesman, Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group