French Lesson

The Pentagon’s special-operations chiefs screened the once-famous 1965 film “The Battle of Algiers” last August, inspiring its timely re-release in selected theatres this month. Produced by arch-terrorist Saadi Yacef (who played himself) and directed by the Italian Communist Gillo Pontecorvo, this favorite of the old New Left recounts with remarkably dispassionate (if selective) accuracy one of France’s many military victories on its road to losing the 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence. Ultimately, the 132-year-old settlement of one million “pied noir” Europeans was driven into the sea.

The Pentagon commandos’ flier advertised, “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas … Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically.” The paratroopers’ plan was to track down Yacef’s top killers using intensive interrogation (i.e., torture).

Perhaps, though, our soldiers should have shown their civilian overlords “The Battle of Algiers” before the latter blithely decided to occupy an Arab country. For extra verisimilitude, the special-ops boys could have strapped Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans ideologue-warriors to their armchairs, pinned their eyelids open, attached electrodes, and applied little jolts of juice to help them remember the movie better.

Even without such stimulation, “The Battle of Algiers” is hard to forget but also hard to enjoy. It’s excellent filmmaking and frank history, yet distasteful entertainment because there are no heroes.

The central figure is the illiterate hoodlum Ali la Pointe, portrayed by the illiterate farmer Brahim Haggiag, a North African James Dean in his only movie. Why this superannuated juvenile delinquent became Yacef’s best murderer is of obvious relevance today. Apparently, Ali la Pointe, like many Arabs, was outraged by the French guillotining of a terrorist who had murdered eight civilians, including a seven-year-old girl. Considering how many thousands of innocents both sides slaughtered, it’s puzzling why the Muslims objected even more to a handful of the guilty being executed, but such are the snares Westerners blunder into when they rule an alien culture.

More generally, the sullen ex-pimp, like so many high-testosterone young men in Iraq, Palestine, and everywhere, just couldn’t stand wealthy and powerful outsiders giving orders instead of him.

“The Battle of Algiers” ignores France’s expensive efforts to buy the hearts and minds of the Arabs and Berbers. Nor does it stress how the insurgents, to prevent peaceful compromise, mutilated and decapitated moderate Muslims and assassinated liberal Europeans. But what it does show of Yacef’s 1956 terror bombings of bistros and discos is horrifying enough. Alistair Horne’s exhaustive 1978 history, A Savage War of Peace, confirms many of the film’s details. (Paul Johnson’s tour de force summary of Horne’s book—furiously illustrating how a few extremists can launch a vicious cycle of provocation, reprisal, and outrage—climaxes his famous Modern Times.)

In despair, Algiers’ civil authorities hand policing over to the paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu. This glamorous character was modeled partly on the redoubtable Jacques Massu, partly on the intellectual colonels like Marcel Bigeard, who had recently parachuted gallantly into the doomed fortress of Dien Bien Phu. While an involuntary guest of General Giap, Bigeard studied Mao’s theories and then used them in his sophisticated counter-guerilla strategy in Algeria.

The anti-French filmmakers give Mathieu most of the best lines. When challenged at a press conference about torture, he answers with Descartes’ logic and Cyrano’s panache:

The problem is: the FLN wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain … Despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain … Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept all the necessary consequences.

The paras liquidated the Casbah rebels’ leadership in 1957. In Algeria, torture worked. What the film doesn’t show is that in France, though, the public started to lose the stomach for the “necessary consequences.” Alarmed that the politicians might throw away their fallen comrades’ sacrifices, the paratroopers threatened to drop on Paris in May 1958 unless Gen. Charles de Gaulle became France’s strong man.

Once in power, however, that great patriot resolved to cut and run. He had to weather two coup attempts and countless assassination plots, but, minus the Algerian tumor, long-suffering France emerged peaceful, prosperous, and democratic.

The same people who said that our invasion of Afghanistan would meet the same fate as the Soviet invasion are now saying our occupation of Iraq will meet the same fate of the French in Algeria. Of course those poeple probably learned their history in government schools. There are several major differences between the Algerian and Iraqi situations:
1) Algeria was a French colony for many years. Iraq was never an American colony.
2) The French sought to keep Algeria. America seeks to get out of Iraq after setting up a stable Iraqi government
3) The French had Charles de Gaulle. America has George W Bush.
4) With the exception of French built and populated coastal cities, Algeria was (and largely still is) a region inhabitated by Arab and Berber nomads. Prior to Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a modern, sophisticated society featuring cities built and populated by Arabs.
5) France sought to change Algeria from what it had been since the days of Hannibal to something that looked like the French Riviera. America seeks to return Iraq to the type of nation it had been for many centuries.

Now the battle has shifted to Metropolitan France (France proper) and the very same difficulties that faced the French in Algiers will soon be facing them in Paris. If the "necessary consequences" are postponed only to be re-encountered a thousand times larger, where is the gain? If freedom is not spread then tyranny and terrorism will gain in its place. If you will not make Algiers like Paris, then they will make Paris like Algiers.

Some good points, but Iraq as a country is only about 80 years old -- it's another cobbled-together artificial entity (like Yugoslavia was). A legacy of the backroom deals in the aftermath of WW I.

I think a good argument could be made for allowing the constituent parts to more or less go their separate ways.

"America seeks to return Iraq to the type of nation it had been for many centuries." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before you go nuts from drumming your chest so hard with pride, you need to reflect on our appointed government in Iraq as they took away the women rights to vote. During Saddam, women were considered equal; now, you are correct, we are returning this country to the way it has been centuries ago -- Good job, screw the minorities as long as the mullahs, and the ayatullahs are happy! You would not learn such information from Fox news, I can guarantee you that. I learned it from C-span coverage of our House of Representatives last night.

"You watch it and realize with horror how long the Islamic world has used terrorism against the modern West. It started long, long before 9/11/01." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Mosques are not used to worship god as they were designed to be, the mullahs have always been agents of incitement to violence in the name of Allah. That is essential what Islam is all about. Friday noon is their big prayer time; accordingly Friday afternoon is when all hell brakes lose, riots/violence after they leave the house of worship in the name of Allah!

My point is that pre-French Algeria and pre-Baath Iraq were two very different places. The cities in Algeria were basically European built. The cities in Iraq were not built by Europeans- some of them were started when Europeans still lived in caves. True, "Iraq" is only 80 years old, but Baghdad dates way back into the Middle Ages. While the French sought to turn a nomadic area into a more fixed residence civilization (rural farms, towns and some cities), the Americans have no such plans as the people living in "Iraq" are already accustomed to fixed-place living.

True, "Iraq" dates only to the Treaty of Versailles. Prior to that it was part of the Ottoman Empire. The civilization in "Iraq" is much, much, much older (goes back at least 4,000 years). The French tried to "civilize" Algeria; the Americans are not trying to "civilize" Iraq since the people there have been lving on fixed farms and in towns and cities since the days of Sargon the Akkadian.

Splitting Iraq might not be a good idea. An independant Kurdistan in the north would destabilize Turkey's tense situation with the Kurds in Turkey, while the Shi'ites in the south might look to merge with Iran.

I will let you in on additional bit of information. Pre-Algerian revolution, the Moslem Algerian people were mostly European in every aspect of their lives. They did not even speak Arabic. Thanks to the radical leftists, and a dictator called Gamal Abdel Nasser, they exported thousands of Algerian teenagers to Egypt to learn Islamic fanaticism as well as the Arabic language. When they went back to Algeria, all hell broke lose.

I watched the Algerian ambassador to Washington giving a speech a couple of weeks ago. He was not in any way a typical Moslem Arab! Never in a million years if you have seen this guy speaks you would have guessed that he was even a Moslem. His intellect, his eloquent, his anti-terrorism, his anti-theocracy,....It was like a breath of fresh air. I have never admired or approved of any Moslem person on this earth, except of this guy. The leftists in the West helped Nasser defeat France, and helped solidify the Pan-Arab/Islamic movement world wide. The Islamic fanatic movement gained even more radical extremist ideologies under the Ayatollah Komeini, and the Saudi Wahhabism. We in the West looked the other way, allowing the building of thousands of mosques in the West, while the Saudis forbid building even one single church. Now in this American Saudi relation, can you guess who the bitch with the weaker position is?

I think a good argument could be made for allowing the constituent parts to more or less go their separate ways.

I could think of a few other countries over there that could use the same treatment. The British and French really botched things up when they got together and had a poorly played game of cartography.

Ah, count on wretchard to go right to the heart of the matter!

All the way back to the drive into Africa and India, we've learned it wrong. The metropole cannot be safe in a world full of barbarians. Either we civilize them, or, someday, they will come to barbarianize us.

Globalization of commerce has greatly magnified the danger. The Hottentots could not threaten London in the 1880s (except by exporting their culture), but now every barbaric, uncivilized cult on earth is less than 24 hours away from New York, Paris, and London.

We are insufficiently ambitious in our war aims, and as a result the possibility of defeat still looms.

Perhaps the most common misconception of the Muslim world in our media is that the Muslims are one monolithic group that thinks and acts the same way. There is a tendancy to portray every Muslim from Morocco to Indonesia as a West hating, borderline terrorist on the verge of sending his son or daughter into a pizzeria with a load of C4. Not all Muslims are Arabs and not all Arabs are Muslims. In fact, the Turks and the Arabs have historically gotten along about as well as the Chinese and Japanese. Sunnis and Shi'ites aren't terribly nice to each other either- sort of like Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.

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