A Savage War of Peace

[Al-khiyal]

Early on in the Iraq War, “The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film about the urban guerrilla struggle between French troops and Algerian nationalists, was favored viewing at both the White House and Pentagon. More recently, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 has become the read of choice for many U.S. military officers serving in Iraq. In the wake of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, what lessons can be drawn from a French colonial war in North Africa, marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary violence and state terror, occurring half a century ago?



On November 1, 1954, the self-declared Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) or National Liberation Front proclaimed an armed struggle for Algerian independence, launching coordinated attacks against French buildings and personnel throughout Algeria. The ensuing Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962; and before it ended, France had committed more than half a million troops to the suppression of the Algerian revolution, an intractable conflict that combined revolutionary war and state terror in brutal fashion.

With the French army left largely to its own devices, torture and other atrocities became widespread, even commonplace. Torture, in particular, was institutionalized by the army. In the process, the senior ranks of the French military grew increasingly disenchanted with its civilian leadership in a manner reminiscent of the retired U.S. generals who called recently for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Eventually, senior military officers turned on the government and attempted to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, an episode captured later by film director Fred Zinnemann in “The Day of the Jackal.”

Alistair Horne, a fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, is the author of 19 books, many of which treat French military or political subjects. Published in 1977, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 was immediately proclaimed by experts from all sides of the political spectrum to be the definitive history of the Algerian war. In rereading the book, the early praise seems justified as Horne does a superb job on detailing the Byzantine intricacies of the conflict with intelligence, style, and grace.

“Class Notes” is an innovative, sometimes provocative, series published by the Washington Post in which journalists visit the classrooms of government officials and Washington insiders teaching the next generation expected to join their ranks. Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post staff writer, published an article in the series on April 28, 2006, based on a visit to the School of Advanced Warfighting, Marine Corps University, in Quantico, Virginia. Sitting in on a course entitled “SAW 7202-06: ‘The French Army at War in Algeria, 1954-1962,'” he discovered the French struggle against Algerian rebels had become a hot topic among officers deploying to Iraq.

Reflecting this interest, the present demand for used copies of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962, now out of print, is so great that the few soft cover copies available on www.alibris.com are selling for up to $265. On www.Amazon.com, a used hardcover edition is offered at $280. I count myself fortunate to have retained a dog-eared old copy, purchased in the late 1970s when I was working in North Africa.

In his Washington Post article, Ricks indicated that the 11 military officers studying Algeria, which included eight marines, one army major, and one officer each from Australia and Italy, looked at the conflict from a variety of perspectives, always with a thought to its similarities and differences with Iraq. For example, both conflicts involved urban terrorism supported by remote desert camps, and both grew very unpopular at home. France deployed a huge conscript army in Algeria while the United States has depended heavily on National Guard and Reserve units, citizen soldiers, in Iraq. On the other hand, France was fighting to remain in Algeria while the United States hopes to withdraw from Iraq as soon as an independent and stable government is in place. The officers also discussed the heavy manpower demands of both conflicts as well as the widespread use of torture in Algeria. Ricks' article was not clear as to what conclusions, if any, were reached by the officers taking the course.

A member of the Italian Communist Party, Gillo Pontecorvo undertook his masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers,” the most atmospheric and forceful film about the war, under prodding from the Algerian resistance leader, Saadi Yacef. Banned in France for many years, the film suggests the French went too far in their widespread adoption of policies of torture, intimidation, and outright murder. That said, “The Battle of Algiers” is neither a propaganda piece nor a how-to-do-it manual. In the film, the leadership of the French army dissects and represses the insurgency as Algerian partisans plan and execute their actions, often using violent means to achieve their goals.

The Battle of Algiers was over by 1957, five years before the Algerian War ended, with the French successful in destroying the FLN resistance network operating in the Casbah, the city's ancient Muslim section. It was a pyrrhic victory at best. France ultimately lost the war, withdrawing in 1962 from a newly independent Algeria ruled by the FLN. The use of force may have been a tactical success, but it was clearly a strategic failure. It inspired support for nationalists in and out of Algeria, discredited the French army, led to domestic political scandals in France, and traumatized French political life for decades.

The Algerian War left some 30,000 French men and women dead, together with as many as one million Algerians. Over 800,000 European settlers, so-called pied-noirs, were driven from Algeria into exile. Algerian auxiliaries recruited by the French, known as harkis, were despised as collaborators by the independence movement. Largely abandoned by the French at the end of the war, they were hunted down and killed by the FLN. Estimates of their losses range from 10,000-150,000. Disputed statistics are only one of the highly-charged issues that perpetuate conflict over the war. The Algerian War also caused the fall of six French governments, resulted in the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned Charles DeGaulle to power, and almost provoked a civil war in France.

The French government never apologized for its conduct during the war, and official France continues to have difficulty dealing with the conflict. It was not until mid-1999 that the word guerre (war) was established officially to describe events in Algeria in 1954-62. In an article in the April 2001 issue of Le Monde diplomatique, journalist Maurice T. Maschino explored in detail the extent to which history textbooks in France still describe its broader colonial history as a “fine intellectual adventure” with a “broadly positive outcome.” The war in Algeria is depicted as a struggle between Europeans, colons(colonists), and paratroopers on one side and Muslims, fanatics, and terrorists (never maquis, resistance fighters, or patriots) on the other. Most of the textbooks mention torture but play it down as an understandable reaction to the massacre of European civilians and a justifiable means to destroy FLN networks or to prevent bomb attacks.

Much like the Vietnam War haunts Americans, the horror and brutality of the Algerian War haunts the French people. The brutality of the war was again exposed in November 2001 when a former French general, who admitted in a book published in May 2001 to the torture and execution of dozens of Algerians during the war, was put on trial and found guilty. General Paul Aussaresses was charged, not with the acts themselves which had long been covered by an amnesty, but for publishing an unapologetic version of them in his book, Services Spéciaux Algérie 1955-1957.

Expressing no remorse for his actions, either in the book or on the witness stand, General Aussaresses admitted to the summary execution of 24 men and to supervising the torture of dozens of others. Arguing torture was the best way to make a terrorist talk, he told the court his actions were justified, adding he would do the same again “if it were against Osama bin Laden.” Of the hundreds of executions he ordered, the general added, “I was indifferent. They had to be killed, that's all there was to it.....”

[Al-khiyal]

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 remains a good read; however, whether or not it should be required reading for U.S. officers serving in Iraq, together with their civilian and military bosses in the White House and Pentagon, depends on the lessons learned. From the perspective of more than a half-century, the Algerian War might seem to some as a precursor to the amorphous struggles now raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts in which religious faith, imperialism, nationalism, and terrorism reach unimagined degrees of intensity, instead of what it was, the last colonial war. This may explain in part its popularity in the Bush administration.

That said, any suggestion that the conditions the United States faces in Iraq mirror those the French encountered in Algeria is off the mark. If the White House is weighing the tactical choices reflected in A Savage War of Peace, the Algerian War would appear to exemplify what not to do in Iraq as opposed to being a user manual for U.S. forces. There is a certain allure to the use of brutal and repressive means to fight clandestine terrorists which some may find attractive; however, the French experience in Algeria demonstrates this is a false path to success. French tactics in Algeria lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Algerians, and in the end, the war itself.

Mounting evidence suggests that the Bush administration is drawing the wrong lessons from Algeria. To be successful in the war on terrorism, you must first win the battle of ideas. American tactics in Iraq, as symbolized by the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and the wanton and methodical murder of civilians at Haditha, suggest a breakdown in moral authority and leadership, similar to what the French experienced in Algeria.

“Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company,” a two-hour documentary about an Ohio marine reserve unit which lost 24 men in Iraq, strongly reinforces this impression. Shown on Memorial Day weekend, this powerful window into the harsh reality of war includes several interviews with young marines who, out of anger and frustration, readily admitted at times to being on the brink of committing violent acts against Iraqi non-combatants.

In the case of Haditha, there remains an open question as to whether this was an isolated incident or the product of what is known as “command climate,” the pressure from up-the-chain-of-command to produce results, pressure which can cause over-reaction as I witnessed first-hand as an army intelligence officer in the Vietnam War. The prolonged incarceration without trial of prisoners at Guantánamo and the policy of rendition simply compound the negative results of this unholy mix. By all means, read Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962, but read it not to learn how to win the war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism, but how to lose it.

Source: A Savage War of Peace

[Al-khiyal]

Un livre sur la guerre d'Algérie va-t-il permettre à George Bush de sortir du guêpier irakien ? Plus de trois ans après la projection au Pentagone de La Bataille d'Alger, le film du cinéaste italien Gillo Pontecorvo, le président américain a reconnu à la mi-janvier avoir lu avec attention, pendant les fêtes de Noël, A Savage War and Peace : Algeria 1954-1962 (New York Review Books) écrit, en 1977, par l'historien britannique Sir Alistair Horne. Ce dernier avait offert un exemplaire de la nouvelle édition de son livre à Henry Kissinger, dont il prépare une biographie. Puis l'ancien secrétaire d'Etat en avait envoyé une copie à M. Bush en insistant pour qu'il la lise immédiatement.

"La saga d'une poignée de maquisards algériens, pauvrement armés mais utilisant avec brio l'arme de la terreur pour vaincre l'armée française, à l'époque l'une des plus fortes de l'OTAN, reste le prototype de la guerre de libération nationale", insiste l'auteur, en recevant Le Monde dans sa maison de Turville, un petit village situé près d'Oxford. Tout en affirmant son refus de se laisser emprisonner par les schémas du passé, ce spécialiste de l'histoire de France contemporaine distingue, dans l'avant-propos à l'édition 2006, quatre points communs entre la guerre d'Algérie et la situation actuelle en Irak.

"Un nerf sensible"

Tout d'abord, face à la supériorité militaire française, le FLN (Front de libération nationale) a concentré ses attaques contre la police indigène, les administrateurs, les hauts fonctionnaires, avec comme résultat une chute du moral, une hausse des défections et la nécessité pour l'armée française de les protéger au lieu de poursuivre les rebelles. Deuxièmement, la porosité des frontières marocaines et tunisiennes a facilité l'acheminement en armes au FLN. La Syrie et l'Iran jouent ce rôle de nos jours en Irak. Troisièmement, le recours à la "gégène" qui a ébranlé durablement l'unité nationale. Pour Alistair Horne, les sévices commis à la prison d'Abou Ghraib, révélés en 2004, ont eu le même impact négatif. Enfin, à ses yeux, le problème du retrait des troupes se pose en termes similaires.

Le 19 avril 2005, Sir Alistair effectue des recherches sur Henry Kissinger au Pentagone. Il doit déjeuner avec le secrétaire à la défense, Donald Rumsfeld, qui annule à la dernière minute. L'auteur lui fait remettre une copie de son livre en soulignant les passages importants. La réplique de M. Rumsfeld est immédiate : "Comme vous le savez, les Etats-Unis ne pratiquent pas la torture en Irak." L'historien renvoie un courrier en insistant sur le "caractère immoral, contre-productif et catastrophique sur le plan médiatique de telles exactions". La réponse du ministre américain, tout aussi rapide, est sibylline : "Vous et moi partageons en fait la même opinion."

"Ce qui m'a le plus surpris, c'est la célérité de la réponse chez cet homme très pris par sa charge. A l'évidence, j'ai touché un nerf sensible", indique l'historien, qui ignore les enseignements qu'a pu tirer le président Bush de ses écrits.

Le président américain, l'historien britannique et la guerre d'Algérie

[FORTUNATO]

Supers!!!! Etais Nos Parents Et Grand Parents........

[Al-khiyal]

Algiers, June 16th, 1962

ALGIERS, Algeria -- First the Pentagon plugged the movie, now President Bush is reading the book.

The subject is Algeria's war of independence against France, in which a Western power struggled with an insurgency and international opposition.

Some see disturbing parallels between Algeria in 1957 to Iraq in 2007. Others say they are different, but that there are lessons to be learned from the war that hastened the end of France's empire.

Bush says he is reading A Savage War of Peace, British historian Alistair Horne's celebrated 1977 account of the war. And shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon was recommending its commanders see Gillo Pontecorvo's movie "The Battle of Algiers."

A key difference between the two wars, historians agree, is that the Algerians did not have Iraq's sectarian divisions. Another difference is that France treated Algeria as an integral part of its territory, with almost a million European settlers, most of whom vigorously opposed any French withdrawal.

Parallels start with the urban terror campaign launched by the FLN, Algeria's National Liberation Front. As in Iraq, local police and administrators made easier targets.

"After the first month of the war the FLN realized they couldn't beat the French army so they concentrated on soft targets," said author Horne in a telephone interview.

"It meant the French army, instead of going on the offensive, had to protect the police, and both of them - the army and the police - were to some extent neutralized. And I think this is exactly what's happening in Iraq."

Zohra Drif Bitat, Algiers, January 2007

Zohra Drif Bitat, now 70 and a member of the Algerian Senate, planted bombs for the independence movement in the capital, Algiers.

But that, she insists, did not make her a terrorist. Instead, she regards herself and her former comrades as freedom fighters - and so she fails to see what U.S. officials fighting terrorism in Iraq can learn from the Algerian experience.

"They want to understand how one becomes a terrorist," Drif Bitat said. "But that's the fundamental mistake they have made because we were combatants on the same level as the GIs in the American army. We were members of the National Liberation Army."

Saadi Yacef, Algiers, January 2007

Drif Bitat joined the FLN's underground Algiers network as a 20-year-old law student in 1955. The group was led by Saadi Yacef from the Casbah, then the densely populated Arab quarter of Algiers.

On Sept. 30, 1956, Yacef sent Drif Bitat with two other women to place bombs in places frequented by Europeans. The event is depicted in the 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers, in which Yacef starred as himself.

"They were reluctant at first, saying to us that civilians are going to die," Yacef, 79 and also a senator, recalled. He then reminded the women of an attack claimed by settlers which left more than 70 Algerians dead. "At that point they agreed to plant the bombs."

Drif Bitat's bomb did the most damage, killing three and wounding more than 50.

"What was unfortunate, what troubled me at the end of it all, was to see a boy or a girl with a severed leg or arm," said Yacef. "But blood calls for blood ... I told myself that the French landed in Algeria by force and they must be pushed out by force."

As the rebellion gathered pace, France sent paratroopers into the capital on January 7, 1957, and the battle of Algiers began.

Yacef continued to direct attacks from hiding until he and Drif Bitat were finally arrested in September 1957, near the battle's end. But the French army's claim of victory was to prove premature. Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero who became France's president in 1958, decided that his country's time in Algeria was up, and in 1962 it withdrew.

But not fast enough, says Horne.

"De Gaulle got out with nothing. He lost everything because he let it drag on too long and this to my mind is the big danger in Iraq," said Horne. "I just don't see how the Americans can get out now because the effect of total chaos would be devastating. On the other hand they can't stay too long."

Then, as now, the stakes were regarded as bigger than just one country. The Soviet Union was vying with the West for influence in North African states, and oil had been discovered in the Algerian Sahara in 1956. Today, the fear is that a withdrawal from Iraq will destabilize the entire Middle East.

The French security forces' use of torture caused an international outcry, echoed when the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public. The legacy of the Algerian war continued to poison French politics. Pontecorvo's acclaimed documentary-style movie did not appear until 1966 and was banned for years in France, in part because of its graphic torture scenes.

"Certainly the use of torture helped them win the battle of Algiers but I think it cost them the war," said Horne.

Drif Bitat says that because of the brutal French tactics, "those who could have hesitated or collaborated with the French said to themselves, 'I'm returning to my own people."'

"We had will and determination," she said. "You kill us but I know that my brother and sister will arrive and continue the fight. That is what is happening in Iraq."

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who recommended A Savage War of Peace to Bush, said recently on PBS' Charlie Rose Show that he did not believe "that the French experience could be applied precisely to the United States."

"But I thought there were enough similarities and enough complexities and enough tragedy for the president to gain a perspective on his own period."

Half-century on, some see Iraq parallels in Algerian war

[Al-khiyal]

Amir Taheri is a leading member of Benador Associates, an American right-wing public relations firm that dedicates considerable energy - but much less dedication to accuracy - to firing up U.S. and international public opinion to support illegal wars of aggression, first in Iraq and next - the Benador team hope - in Iran. Taheri is the creator of such lying propaganda as the bogus 'Iranian dress code for Jews' story and as we might expect from a committed and dishonest warmonger he has a very different view about the lessons of this book:

If President George W Bush's political enemies are to be believed, the one thing he has never done is read a book. So, it might come as a surprise that Bush spent part of his holiday last Christmas reading a thick book sent to him as a present by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In a little note attached to the parcel, Kissinger speculated that the president might find the book of interest in view of the challenges the United States faces in Iraq.

The book in question is A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by the historian Alistair Horne and originally published three decades ago. The book has been a "must-read" for anyone interested in guerrilla wars and the anti-colonial armed struggles in the so-called Third World. It could be read both as a thrilling narrative of the eight-year long conflict and a manual on tactics and strategy in guerrilla warfare.

In a preface for the new paperback edition. Horne clearly draws attention to parallels between the Algerian war and the current conflict in Iraq.

He recalls the fact that the French antagonized many Algerians through indiscriminate mass arrests, at times followed by mistreatment and even torture of prisoners. Although the Abu-Ghuraib incidents in which a dozen or so US soldiers humiliated their Iraqi prisoners did not occur because of official American policy, the impact on many Iraqis was devastating.

Horne also claims that the US policy of enabling the new Iraqi army and police to control the country is doomed. In Algeria, too, more Algerians were fighting in the ranks of the French army than against it. And, yet, a much smaller force of guerrillas and terrorists succeeded in raising the cost of the conflict in human terms to levels that the French public could not tolerate.

According to Horne the terrorist cells operated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) were far more savage in their brutality and violence than the insurgent groups fighting in Iraq. The FLN seldom took on the French army directly, and when it did it always suffered a humiliating defeat.

In purely military terms the French had won the war in Algeria as early as 1958. But that was not a classical conflict. The problem was that the French could never ensure the first duty of a government, that is to say provide security for the citizens.

The FLN, like Al Qaeda in Iraq, made sure that it killed enough people in the capital, Algiers, to make sure that everyone felt unsafe throughout that vast land. The same tactic is used by Al Qaeda in Iraq today by killing a few people in Baghdad every day. The idea is to create an atmosphere in which most people are prepared to trade their freedom for security.

The implicit lesson of Horne's book is that small groups of terrorists can always win against the biggest and best-equipped armies provided they can continue killing innocent people long enough.

Not surprisingly, Horne's book has become a kind of bible for all those who opposed the toppling of Saddam Hussein. It is cited by opponents of the new Iraq as a conclusive argument that there is nothing that the US can do to help the people of Iraq protect themselves against the insurgents and terrorists. The only way out is to abandon Iraq, thus allowing a bloodbath from which he who can kill more and stay alive will emerge victorious. The victor will then impose his rule on the country.

Horne's book, while massively interesting in the areas it does cover, is far from a comprehensive study of the broader aspects of the Algerian conflict.

To start with it pays little attention to the international context of the war. In the 1950s, as the Cold War was reshaping the bane of power in Europe, France boasted the second largest army of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the United States. Thus it was important for the Soviet bloc to keep the French army pinned down in as many conflicts as possible. The French had already withdrawn from another colonial war in Vietnam and wee busy shedding their colonial burden in Africa as well.

For anyone interested in making trouble for the French at the time, Algeria was the obvious choice. The French regarded Algeria as part of their national territory, not a colonial possession that might achieve independence at some point. Moreover, one-seventh of the inhabitants of Algeria at the time were ethnic European who could not conceive of themselves as citizens of a non-European state. Fomenting a major rebellion in Algeria, however, would not have been possible without the support of neighboring countries. But that support was not forthcoming until Morocco and Tunisia attained independence in 1955 and 1957. Another event, in 1956, helped tip the balance in favor of anti-French rebels in Algeria. It was the Suez fiasco that dealt a blow to French, and British, prestige, and turned Egypt the Western powers, opening it to Soviet influence.

By 1958 when General De Gaulle seized power in Paris, the Algerian conflict had been transformed into a proxy war waged by the Soviet Union and its Egyptian client against France and its NATO allies.

Another aspect of the Algerian war that Horne does not properly attend to is the violence unleashed by the FLN and the various pro-French Algerian outfits, notably the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS) in metropolitan France, especially Paris, itself.

Horne sneers at the claim of the French generals that France lost the Algerian war for political rather than military reasons.

The truth, however, is that the French political system at the time reached its threshold of pain much earlier than the French military did. A good part of the French political and intellectual elite sympathized with the FLN and saw France as an imperialist power engaged in a colonial war. In a famous comment, Jean-Paul Sartre, the guru of the French left at the time, insisted that the interests of the global revolutionary movement required that France be defeated, and be seen to be defeated, in Algeria. In that sense, a parallel can be drawn between Algeria at the time and Iraq today. Today, there are elements in the US, including in the Congress and the Senate, who would do anything to ensure a clear-cut American defeat in Iraq as a means of humiliating Bush and/or his Republican Party.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, it is foolish to see the war in Iraq today as a replay of Algeria's four decades ago. In Algeria a majority of the population, Arabs and Berbers, did not feel they were French and were seduced by the idea of creating a nation of their own. In Iraq, however, a majority of the Iraqis want to protect their new won freedom and broadly support the new system. Moreover, the US is not a colonial power and has no intention of maintaining a permanent military presence in Iraq.

Also, the FLN, although supported by several Arab states as well as the Soviet bloc, was a genuinely Algerian outfit while Al Qaeda is an alien force in Iraq. By 1960 the FLN would have won any free elections in Algeria. In Iraq, however, Al Qaeda and its insurgent allies are unlikely to make much of an impression in a similar exercise. Whether one liked it or not, the FLN was swimming with the tide of history that was directed to decolonization and national independence. In Iraq, however, Al Qaeda and the Saddamites are swimming against the tide that is in the direction of freedom, open markets and pluralism.

Bush would do well to read Horne's book. But he should not he should not read it as a recipe for policy on Iraq. History does not repeat itself, except, as Marx noted, as a farce.

Amir Taheri reviews A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962