Scott McConnell: Algeria ... The Model
When contemplating Iraq, Americans look into a murky crystal ball. History naturally presents itself as a tool to clarify the choices and possibilities that lie before us. But what history? Before the invasion, neoconservatives soaked the capital in the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and the “lessons” of the 1930s. Later, after Saddam was found to have no weapons of mass destruction, they sought to rebrand the Iraq War as a part of the long struggle against totalitarian “Islamofascism” and thus a successor to the Cold War. For many Americans, the natural comparison is the Vietnam War, which ended with evacuation choppers on the Saigon embassy’s roof and several more years of bloodshed in Indochina.
The French war in Algeria, never well known in the United Sates, has its own claims to stake. Before the Iraq War commenced, some Pentagon special operations officers attended a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 docudrama, “The Battle of Algiers.” More recently, reporters were told that George W. Bush was reading Alistair Horne’s exhaustive A Savage War of Peace—a book that, Horne stated in the preface to the recent paperback edition, was Ariel Sharon’s favorite bedtime reading. (Israeli dove Amos Elon remarked that Sharon must have completely misunderstood the work.)
What lessons might Americans draw from the Algerian war? They are not obvious. The brutal conflict, which gave rise to an extraordinary memoir literature in French, impinged on France’s national life far more than Iraq has yet touched America. But some common features are clear. The Algerian war was more or less part of our own historic era, influenced by international air travel and mass communications. A Western democracy was facing off against Arab Muslims; terrorism against civilians—first employed by the Arab guerrillas and later by the French far Right—was a central aspect of the war; and the use of torture to root out the terror networks produced a moral upheaval in France. Indeed, the war very nearly cost France its democracy.
In the end, it required the extraordinary political leadership of Charles de Gaulle, who turned against some of his most devoted supporters, to extricate France from the mess and move the country forward. Losing the war proved far more painful for the Algerians who had aligned themselves with France than for France itself. If one is looking for an example of a comparatively rich and technologically superior Christian country trying to dominate an Arab land against substantial local and international opposition, Algeria surely fits the template.
Still, different people will draw different conclusions about the conflict: The Weekly Standard’s Irwin Steltzer reports (with great satisfaction) that the lesson George W. Bush has apparently imbibed from Alistair Hornes’s book is that France didn’t stay long enough!...
[The article goes on to say that de Gaulle decided early after WW II that colonialism was dead. Once he came to power in 1958 he decided to end France's presence in Algeria even though the war was being won.]
Freed of its colony, France quickly began to modernize its own economy (which grew at an amazing 6.8 percent in 1962 after the armistice). Algeria remained full of French teachers, doctors, and technicians. The French constructed a flattering narrative for themselves: they had “given” Algeria its independence because they wanted to, thus providing for the world a model for decolonization and modernization.
To the surprise of few, a darkness descended on Algeria. The first victims were the harkis, those who had served in the French army. Perhaps as many 100,000 were slaughtered, often with great sadism, being made to swallow their French medals before execution. Then the revolution turned on itself: Ben Bella, the country’s first president, spent most of the 1960s in an Algerian prison, as he had spent much of the 1950s in a French one. But France was done with it.
So how could the Algerian war not speak to us? Its example has long resonated in Israel, and many even hoped that Sharon—a successful military man of the Right—could do what no liberal Israeli leader could accomplish and withdraw Israel from the West Bank.
But now its lessons are dear to America as well as we search the horizon for a leader who can explain to the country—especially to the military and to the Republican Party—that its destiny doesn’t lie in the long-term occupation of Arab lands. The rhetoric that justifies the Iraq War as part of colossal battle against “Islamofascism” could be lifted almost directly from the French colonial intellectual slogans of the 1950s—and is no less self-deluding. To leave Vietnam, America needed a man of the Right, Richard Nixon. Today, when we need our own de Gaulle to achieve a “victory over ourselves,” we don’t even have a Nixon.