Book: Give War a Chance

Overview
P. J. O'Rourke's Give War a Chance (1992) is a collection of reportage and satire from the hinge years at the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War. Written from hotel lobbies, press buses, ruined streets, and bars where the news cycle pauses for a drink, the pieces mix eyewitness detail with a libertarian skepticism about governments, ideologies, and the clichés of peace activism. The tongue-in-cheek subtitle about mankind's struggle against tyranny, injustice, and alcohol-free beer signals the book's stance: irreverent about rhetoric, serious about the stakes.

Scope and settings
O'Rourke tracks the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, then pivots to the Middle East as Saddam Hussein's Iraq invades Kuwait and the U.S.-led coalition responds. He writes from Berlin and Moscow as the old order cracks, from Prague as dissidents become statesmen, and from the Gulf as the coalition builds up forces and then routs the Iraqi army. The vantage is that of a seasoned foreign correspondent who prefers the uncomfortable edge of events to the platitudes of conferences, and who treats press briefings, diplomatic communiqués, and propaganda with equal comic suspicion.

Themes and arguments
The central claim is that force, when used against tyrants and aggressors, sometimes solves problems that negotiation, earnest protest, and multilateral waffle cannot. This is less a blanket endorsement of war than a provocation aimed at the therapeutic language of late–20th century politics. He delights in puncturing the vanity of Western elites who sermonize about "root causes" from safe distances, while applauding ordinary soldiers and citizens who bear the costs of history. The fall of communism becomes, in his telling, not the triumph of a new theory but the exhaustion of a bad one; central planning fails because it misunderstands human nature, not because it lacked clever managers. The Gulf War, meanwhile, is framed as a rare case where aim, means, and outcome align: a limited, clearly justified operation to reverse aggression, competently executed by professionals, and mercifully short.

Portraits and set pieces
The book is packed with set pieces that crystallize its politics through humor. O'Rourke lingers in decrepit Soviet shops where nothing works except the black market, then drops into glitzy Gulf hotels where everything works except the press’s grasp of military reality. He sketches dissidents turned presidents with affectionate irreverence, noting the unglamorous work of building free institutions after the cheering stops. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait he follows Marines and tankers, catching the blend of boredom, bravado, and competence that defines modern warfare, and he mocks both Saddam’s cult of personality and the tendency of some Western commentators to treat dictators as geopolitical "contexts" rather than criminals.

Style and tone
The voice is classic O'Rourke: gonzo without self-pity, learned without pedantry, and always hunting for the absurd seam where official language splits from lived experience. Jokes arrive as arguments in miniature. He will pile ridicule on the United Nations one minute and salute a grunt’s quiet professionalism the next, using contrast to make moral judgments without sermonizing. The brisk, anecdotal pacing reflects the magazine origins of many pieces, but the through-line is coherent: freedom is messy and precious, ideology is dangerous, and euphemism is the enemy of clear thought.

Place in O'Rourke’s work
Give War a Chance extends the travel-with-an-attitude approach of Holidays in Hell into the epochal events of 1989–1991. It captures the end of one world and the improvised beginning of another, arguing that history, when it turns, is pushed by people with rifles as much as by people with resolutions. The blend of reportage and satire makes the book a time capsule of its moment and a statement of O'Rourke’s enduring creed: cheer for liberty, distrust utopia, and never confuse sobriety of mind with alcohol-free beer.