Michael T. Kaufman, "What Does the Pentagon See in 'Battle of Algiers'?"

(The New York Times, September 7, 2003)<<

 

Horne's book is a devastating indictment of colonialism. It has now been

reissued as a paperback and I strongly recommend it. Here's a review by

Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post author of "Fiasco", a celebrated attack

on the war in Iraq.

 

The Washington Post

November 19, 2006 Sunday

Aftershocks; A classic on France's losing fight against Arab rebels

contains troubling echoes of Iraq today.

 

Reviewed by Thomas E. Ricks

 

A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE

Algeria 1954-1962

By Alistair Horne

New York Review Books. 608 pp. Paperback, $19.95

 

When Americans talk about the raging insurgency in Iraq, they often draw

parallels with the Vietnam War, but a better analogy is probably the French

war against nationalist rebels in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. That's one

reason why the landmark history of that conflict, Alistair Horne's A Savage

War of Peace, has been an underground bestseller among U.S. military

officers over the last three years, with used copies selling on Amazon.com

for $150. Indeed, "Algeria" has become almost a codeword among U.S.

counterinsurgency specialists -- a shorthand for the depth and complexity

of the mess we face in Iraq. Earlier this year, I referred to Horne's book

while conversing with one such expert in Taji, Iraq, and got a grim nod of

agreement.

 

Now a new paperback edition of Horne's 1977 classic has been issued,

cutting the price of wisdom to a more reasonable $19.95. In a new preface,

Horne makes the connection to Iraq explicit. First, he notes, the Algerian

insurgents fighting to end France's colonial control over the country

avoided taking on the French army directly; instead, they attacked the

police and other more vulnerable targets, thereby demoralizing local

supporters of the French presence. Second, Algeria's porous borders greatly

aided the insurgents, who could receive reinforcements, arms and sanctuary

from neighboring countries such as Tunisia and Morocco. Third, and most

emphatically, he writes that "torture should never, never, never be

resorted to by any Western society."

 

Those three parallels are provocative enough, as far as they go. But many

other, perhaps less obvious points in Horne's lucid, well-organized history

may do even more to deepen our understanding of the Iraq War.

 

Again and again, Horne wrote passages about the French in Algeria that

could describe the U.S. military in Iraq. As I wrote about the U.S. Army's

big "cordon-and-sweep" operations that detained tens of thousands of

civilian Iraqi males in the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003, I

remembered Horne: "This is the way an administration caught with its pants

down reacts under such circumstances. . . . First comes the mass

indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted

into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."

 

Like the Americans in Iraq, the French in Algeria consistently

misunderstood the nature of the opposition, focusing too much on supposed

foreign support and too little on the local roots of the insurgency. Horne

also detected a distinctly familiar pattern of official optimism among

French officials, who were quick to declare their war "virtually over" four

years before it ended in their defeat.

 

Moreover, A Savage War of Peace draws an important distinction between

torture by the police and torture by the military. The former damages

mainly individuals and need not be hugely damaging to the war effort; the

latter, Horne quotes a former French officer as saying, involves the honor

of the nation -- as it did at Abu Ghraib and other facilities where Iraqis

were abused by American soldiers in 2003-04.

 

Along the way, Horne offers three other comments that are not particularly

encouraging. First, when considering the Bush administration's policy of

having U.S. forces stand down as newly trained Iraqi forces stand up, it is

worth noting that throughout the eight years of the Algerian war, more

Algerians were fighting on the French side than on the rebel side -- and

the French still lost.

 

Second, when trying to understand Iraq's current violence, it is good to

recall Horne's comment that "such a simultaneous internal 'civil war' "

often rages alongside a "revolutionary struggle against an external enemy."

 

Finally, when we hear U.S. military officers arguing that they achieved

their mission in Iraq but that the rest of the U.S. government failed or

the will of the American people faltered, remember Horne's quotation from a

French general, Jacques de Bollardière, who was critical of his army's

performance: "Instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its

tactical and strategic errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination

and tried -- not without reason, however -- to excuse its mistakes by the

faults of civil authority and public opinion."

 

To be sure, there are huge differences between the two wars. Most notably,

the United States isn't a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to maintain a

presence of troops and settlers as long as possible. Rather, in Iraq,

victory would consist of getting U.S. personnel out while leaving behind a

relatively friendly, open, stable and independent government. And while

elements of the French military tried to assassinate French President

Charles de Gaulle for pulling out from what he termed "a bottomless

quagmire," there is little fear that U.S. officers will go down that

rebellious road.

 

But there are numerous suggestive parallels -- mainly relating to

conventional Western militaries fighting primarily urban insurgencies in

Arab cultures while support for their wars dwindles back home and while the

insurgents hope to outlast their better-armed opponents. As such, anyone

interested in Iraq should read this book immediately. *

 

Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post military correspondent who has reported

frequently from Iraq, is the author of "Fiasco: The American Military

Adventure in Iraq."


Page Information

  • Changed 1 year ago [show history]
  • View page source
  • You're not logged in
  • No tags yet learn more

Wiki Information

Recent PBwiki Blog Posts